These men have undoubtedly been influenced by what they have taken to be the passive approval of their officers from Tudor downwards to believe they will never be punished for anything.

— Mark Sturgis, assistant under-secretary, Dublin Castle, diary entry.

The Black and Tans are often remembered as British criminals emptied from prison cells and turned loose to enact rapacious violence on a rebellious Ireland. This story simplifies the abuses of the British Empire, providing a recognisable embodiment of its oppression. Rather, the truth of the Black and Tans (and the often-conflated or forgotten Auxiliary Division) is a story of ordinary men corrupted by a state to deprive a people of dignity, safety, and self-determination.

On the night of 20th September 1920, a head constable was shot at Balbriggan in County Dublin. Police of the Royal Irish Constabulary (the R.I.C.) returned with swift reprisals. By morning, two men were dead, forty-nine houses razed or damaged, four public houses looted and burned, and Balbriggan’s primary employer, a hosiery factory, was destroyed. Days later, a notice appeared in the local press of Drogheda, twenty miles up the coast:

If in the vicinity a policeman is shot, five of the leading Sinn Féiners will be shot. It is not coercion – it is an eye for an eye. We are not drink-maddened savages as we have been described in the Dublin rags... Stop the shooting of police, or we will lay low every house that smells of Sinn Féin. Remember Balbriggan.

Nobody was punished for this heinous collective retaliation. The men responsible were primarily decorated war veterans and unemployed working men, including Irishmen, who correctly understood the British state would not stop them. Indeed, they were emboldened and empowered in their brutality.

This is Part 1 of our Deep Dive series on British colonial policing. In this instalment, we examine who the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division actually were, what they did in Ireland between 1920 and 1921, and the ongoing historical debate over who authorised their oppressive actions. Part 2 follows these same men and methods to Mandate Palestine from the 1920s through 1948, exploring how this policing model influenced the brutalities of the emerging Zionist Israeli state.

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The making of the Black and Tans

By late 1919, the R.I.C., established in 1836, was disintegrating. With the rise of Sinn Féin and the establishment of local Dáil courts, hundreds of rural stations were abandoned in response to an IRA campaign targeting police patrols. Shrinking numbers were concentrated in fortified barracks. Local communities applied intense pressure to policemen, their families, and anyone doing business with them. In late May 1920, the Inspector-General reported 250 resignations or retirements during April alone, confessing that if conditions persisted, his men would run amok en masse.

Lloyd George’s government could not recognise the Irish Republican Army or Dáil Éireann as belligerents without fundamentally undermining Britain’s perceived right to rule Ireland. Consequently, suppressing the independence movement remained a policeman’s job, supported by the military rather than led by it. This immense burden fell on a collapsing police force, prompting the government to recruit across the United Kingdom. Between early 1920 and the July 1921 Truce, 13,732 new constables poured into a force of fewer than ten thousand. A shortage of conventional bottle-green R.I.C. uniforms meant men were issued temporary army khaki to mix with regulation gear, creating the mismatched aesthetic that earned them the “Black and Tans” moniker.

A constable staffing the London recruiting office contemporaneously denied that these men were criminals:

A canard has been put about that we recruited criminals deliberately … we had a police report on every candidate and accepted no man whose army character was assessed at less than ‘good’.

Historian W. J. Lowe, who extensively researched the R.I.C. personnel registers at the National Archives in Kew, found little to contradict this. Nearly four-fifths of recruits were British, and 82 per cent were Protestant. However, nearly 19 per cent of the sampled men were Irish-born. Extrapolated across the intake, that represents over 2,300 Irishmen in the Black and Tans and around 225 in the Auxiliary Division. Most Irish recruits, unlike their British counterparts, lacked military experience. They joined because the constabulary offered decently paid, pensioned employment in a country with few stable career opportunities. They were also the men least likely to leave. Of the entire 1920–21 intake, only 39 per cent were still serving when the force disbanded in 1922; however, Irish-born recruits stayed at a markedly higher rate than the English (55 per cent against 36 per cent).

Almost none of these recruits received real training. Douglas Duff, a merchant seaman torpedoed twice before he was twenty, read about Ireland in the newspapers and went to a recruiting office. He noted: “That was on Monday morning - the following Friday, at dawn, I was steaming into Dublin Bay, with a rubber stamp mark on my arm that read ‘Royal Irish Constabulary.’” Duff recalled a head constable addressing the new arrivals: “All you scabs that have served in the Infantry will receive three days’ training and will then be posted to County stations.” Duff’s three days amounted to an afternoon on small arms and a day in a classroom on the law. Men who told the truth about their non-military backgrounds received a month of instruction that bore little resemblance to police work. George Crawford, who joined in June 1920, stated:

At the time it was all military training, you were got up by bugle in the morning at six o’clock, reveille went at six and tattoo went at ten at night, and you answered roll-call. From six in the morning till five in the evening you were continually at drill. At school we did Acts of Parliament and all sorts of police duties. The whole day was taken up and you never had more than about fifteen minutes between each, either school or drill or gym. We were taught bayonet fighting and the usual military stuff.

Robert Crossett, who joined the same year, could barely read and understood the implications: “I wasn’t a good policeman. I was a good enough policeman, I done the work as well as any of them, but if I had been left on my own, like, I would have been hopeless.”

The Auxiliary Division, raised that summer, was a different proposition: 2,214 former officers (formally titled cadets) organised as a mobile striking force independent of ordinary R.I.C. formations, paid a pound a day - twice a constable’s rate. Popular memory often fuses these two forces into one mass of released convicts, but historian A. D. Harvey’s work on the Auxiliary register dismantles this myth:

But though most of the Auxiliaries had had routinely undistinguished military careers, their numbers included some indubitable war heroes. There were three holders of the Victoria Cross, and another 'cadet' had been awarded the French medaille militaire, which was only given to junior ranks for acts of outstanding courage. Thirty-one others had been decorated for gallantry twice, seven had been decorated three times, and two four times.

These were not societal dregs. They were some of the highest-paid uniformed men globally. Yet, many were psychological casualties of the Great War. Harvey explains:

The indications are that the Auxiliary Division of the R.I.C. offered a haven for these psychological casualties: schoolboys who had become killers instead of going to university, working-class men disorientated by wartime promotion to the status of officers and gentlemen, fractured personalities whose childhood maladjustments had found temporary relief in the 1914-18 War and whose outward stability depended on the psychic reassurance of a khaki tunic on their back and a Webley .455 at their hip. Their misconduct in Ireland is the more easily understood when one reflects that in Germany it was men of this sort who flocked to join the Freikorps, the right-wing paramilitary bands which flourished in the early days of the Weimar Republic.

The British Imperial State leveraged soldiers brutalised by trench warfare, for whom civilian reintegration proved unattainable. This reality survives in Irish Republican memory, notably in Dominic Behan’s famous song, 'Come Out Ye Black and Tans.' The chorus commands: “Come Out Ye Black and Tans, Come out and fight me like a man, Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders” a clear reference to men decorated for soldiering yet left irreconcilably violent.

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Ordered or Unleashed?

On 17 April 1920, a Cork jury delivered a ‘wilful murder’ verdict against Prime Minister David Lloyd George and senior British officials, including Lord John French, following the shooting of the city’s lord mayor, Tomás MacCurtain. The Irish Times dismissed this as “a novel stroke of Celtic fantasy.” Yet, a secret memo surfaced years later, which academics John Borgonovo and Gabriel Doherty argue “reveals a disturbing policy of assassination sanctioned by the highest level of the British government in Ireland”.

This ignites a crucial historical debate: Did the British government specifically order the reprisals of 1918-1921, or merely allow them to happen?

Since the 1970s, consensus suggested the Crown forces were simply unleashed without strict oversight. The secret memo, dated 1st June 1920 from Brigadier-General Prescott-Decie to assistant under-secretary Andy Cope, challenges this. Detailing the collapse of British authority, Prescott-Decie wrote:

The Loyal people and the Law abiding people who are considerable in number are completely terrorised. They openly say “What is the good of being Loyal to the British government which let us down every time”. A fine old man said to me yesterday “my three sons were killed in the War, my only daughter died of disease while nursing, and now I am being robbed of my land, and yet I am loyal? God knows why”

The situation with the police themselves has been very ticklish. They have been very near throwing up the sponge. They consider that they have been let down by the Government and that they have been unsupported.

He then seemingly explicitly endorsed a violent mandate:

I have been told the new policy and plan and I am satisfied, though I doubt its ultimate success in the main particular – the stamping out of terrorism by secret murder. I still am of opinion that instant retaliation is the only course for this, and until it is stamped for good and all, the same situation is likely to recur.

Borgonovo and Doherty assess this as “indisputable evidence that Dublin Castle authorized an assassination campaign against its republican opponents” suggesting the R.I.C. were “simply implementing the cold-blooded direct orders of their superiors.”

Mark Sturgis, a senior civil servant at Dublin Castle, recorded his colleague Andy Cope’s view that to shoot a known bad man “is morally much more defensible than this stupid blind work” of arson. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson recorded that Lloyd George - who seems to have staunchly defended this policy of targeted reprisals - believed such a policy existed and “was gloating over this and hugging it to his heart as a remedy for the disgraceful state of Ireland.” It’s worth noting that Wilson’s family arrived in Ireland with William of Orange in 1690. You can read more on the violence of William’s rule in Ireland which is explored in our series on The Glorious Revolution. For his part, Field Marshall Wilson was an outspoken critic of Lloyd George and R.I.C. Chief Inspector Henry Hugh Tudor (who himself would later take on leadership of the Palestine Police in 1922, to be explored in Part 2).

As for the author of the letter, contemporary General Sir Neville Macready said of Prescott-Decie, “that martial law means that he can kill anybody he sees walking along the road whose appearance may be distasteful to him.” The Brigadier-General was promoted to senior commissioner for Munster later that year, and ended his career associating with British fascists.

Historian D. M. Leeson meticulously dissects this memo. Leeson notes that if killings were authorised in spring 1920, they took months to materialize. In west Galway, no extrajudicial killings occurred in June or July, save for riots in Tuam. The first targeted assassinations there - Michael Walsh and Father Michael Griffin - did not happen until October and November. “If Dublin Castle did authorise a programme of assassination in the spring,” Leeson argues, “it seems odd that more than five months would elapse before the first of these assassinations was carried out in Galway.”

Whether Cope or Taylor were the recipients of this memo, the reality of the violence behind these reprisals warrants exploration. On 19 July 1920 the IRA ambushed a police patrol in County Galway and killed two constables. The police went into Tuam looking for the men responsible and, not finding them, wrecked the town. Several buildings were set on fire, some with women and children still inside. Then the constables moved on to the houses of known Sinn Féin members.

Ten weeks later the men who burned Balbriggan would post a notice in Drogheda insisting that they were not out for loot, that they were inoffensive to women, and that they were as humane as other Christians. Over the following month the local IRA commanding officer, Michael Moran, was arrested, imprisoned, released, rearrested and finally murdered in Black and Tan custody. At his funeral the police attempted to break up the ranks of IRA men walking behind the hearse. On 21st August a botched ambush at Oranmore, less than a mile from Renmore Barracks, killed Constable Martin Foley. The police who came to investigate were, at first, restrained but as the night wore on they ended up going through republican houses, shooting indiscriminately and setting them alight.

The pattern of these incidents travelled throughout the country. Reprisal in one county produced reprisal in the next, and it acquired the character of a slogan: The Times reported that police in County Longford burned down the homes of local Sinn Féin leaders while shouting “Up Tuam!” By the end of that autumn the British had lost fifty-four police and twelve soldiers killed, with a hundred police and fifty-four soldiers wounded; thirty-three court houses had been destroyed and seventeen damaged.

That same summer, during a July 1920 cabinet conference, nearly every senior civil servant argued for a negotiated settlement. William Wylie, the Law Adviser, warned that the police force was finished, inevitably doomed to resign through terror or commit counter-outrages in retaliation. If a secret killing program existed, Wylie either concealed it from the cabinet or remained entirely ignorant of it. Indeed, the officials who met were pushing for a negotiated settlement. The timeline and motivations between this secret memo and the various assassinations do not line up. Leeson states that “If Dublin Castle did authorise a programme of assassination in the spring, it seems odd that more than five months would elapse before the first of these assassinations was carried out in Galway.”

The sole dissenter of this cabinet conference was Major-General Hugh Tudor, the Police Adviser. Instead of seeking permission to kill, Tudor demanded sweeping emergency powers, including replacing civilian tribunals with courts-martial, deporting prisoners, and flogging those who committed outrages against women. Crucially, Tudor was denied these powers. (Keep this list in mind for Part 2). Of Tudor, Leeson describes:

Tudor argued that, ‘given the proper support, it would be possible to crush the present campaign of outrage’. But when asked what he meant by proper support, Tudor provided a list of emergency powers and population-control measures, including replacing civilian tribunals by courts martial; introducing identity cards; requiring passports to enter Ireland; restricting changes of domicile; deporting prisoners to Great Britain; and imposing collective fines on disturbed districts. He also thought that ‘there should be a special penalty of flogging imposed for the cutting of girls’ hair and outrages against women’. Armed with such emergency powers, and with enough police reinforcements, Tudor was confident he could control the situation

While Leeson views a formally sanctioned assassination program as infeasible, Borgonovo and Doherty highlight a vital colonial truth: oppressive states benefit from informally encouraging collective punishment to retain control. On 16th June 1920, Listowel police mutinied after being ordered to hand their barracks to the military. Divisional Commissioner Gerald Smyth and General Tudor arrived to suppress the mutiny. According to Constable Jeremiah Mee, Smyth declared:

You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but this cannot be helped and you are bound to get the right persons sometimes. The more you shoot the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.

Smyth was assassinated by the IRA weeks later. Following subsequent IRA ambushes in Galway, police exacted fierce reprisals, yet Tudor addressed the men amicably, promising better pay and equipment rather than disciplinary action. Leeson notes:

He then explained that Dominion Home Rule, applying to all Ireland, was to come into operation in the near future and that the R.I.C. would come out well under the new arrangement; that, for instance, they would get twelve years added to their service for the purpose of pensions.

Twelve days after that, were the burnings at Balbriggan.

Senior officials actively protected law-breaking constables. When Brigadier-General Crozier dismissed fifty Auxiliaries for misconduct, his summary dismissal powers were revoked, prompting his resignation. After Auxiliaries indiscriminately fired inside a Castleconnell hotel—killing an R.I.C. sergeant, a cadet, and the manager—a court of enquiry exonerated them. A Deputy Adjutant General privately noted:

They all had the wind up, blood up, and did what they used to do in the trenches in France. In the circumstances you cannot hold them criminally responsible, but they are not fit to be policemen — but are any Auxiliaries?

Tudor eventually issued vague circulars demanding an end to “wild firing” and arson, but specified no penalties. The centre of Cork was burned less than a week after his final warning. Leeson concludes:

What the R.I.C. needed in the spring and summer of 1920 was not incitement, but restraint. At the moment when they should have tightened the reins of police discipline, the authorities loosened them instead … So long as they stayed within the margin of tolerated illegality — so long as they retaliated against republican activists and militants, and spared the lives and property of ‘civilians’ — the police, like the guerrillas, were above the law.

Ultimately, it seems that nobody needed to order the burning of Balbriggan. It was enough that nobody was going to be punished for it.

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Left to pick up the pieces

Just over 2,300 people died in the Irish War of Independence. Set against post-war Europe, these figures are comparatively low. Yet, as historian Anne Dolan argues, this statistical assessment does not evidence British restraint; it proves the terror worked. Over two thousand files survive from military courts of inquiry, which replaced civilian inquests. While often dismissed by historians as mere cover-ups, Dolan values these records for preserving civilian trauma:

The military courts of inquiry are an unparalleled source of how civilian witnesses put killing into words; the point is how they chose to represent it, not whether they got the details right or wrong.

These witnesses, interviewed within hours of the events, are largely missing from social memory. In County Longford, Auxiliaries set fire to a house following an ambush. When 68-year-old Michael Farrell tried to escape, they shot him. An Auxiliary knocked on his widow's door, and she testified: “After firing [the house] he told me that he had shot my husband & that I could go & pick him up. I went & found him lying in a little field close to the bog & at some distance from my house.”

In another testimony, Mary Ann Cunningham explains was woken at close to three in the morning:

I went to the door, opened it and saw 4 masked men who told me not to get excited they only wanted to talk to my husband … I was kept inside my house. I then heard three shots and then went out and found my husband lying on the ground about 20 yards from the door … My husband died in my presence about 10 minutes later without speaking … He had no enemies that I know of.

These files incessantly record utter helplessness. Mollie Vanston, whose husband was killed at their door, pleaded with a neighbour for help, "but he said he’d also be shot if he came out." These witnesses were often children. Sarah Fleming was eight when she watched her brother die and tried to talk to him afterwards, standing in the road in her shift, “nearly naked and wild cold,” shot through the arm. Her father died the same night. John McSweeney was fifteen when soldiers shot him in front of his eight-year-old brother, who was sent home with the sugar and the soda their mother had sent them both to the creamery for.

Giving evidence was dangerous from both directions. Six armed men cut Evelyn Baker’s hair in September 1920 to punish her for testifying about the death of Constable Krumm. The cutting of hair (or ‘Bobbing’) was a pervasive form of punishment designed to terrorise women and deter them from colluding with Republicans. In December 1920, two witnesses at the inquiry into James Hickey’s death in Tipperary were granted anonymity and then named when the proceedings were published for propaganda purposes. One Dublin Castle official’s note on a file reads that the case “would make good propaganda if the brutal nature of the crime was properly written up.”

Irishmen killing Irishmen

Beyond the confused origins of the Black and Tans, a deeply overlooked tragedy is how much violence was meted out by Irishmen upon their compatriots. John Reynolds is a serving member of An Garda Siochana (the national police force of the Republic of Ireland) and founder of the Garda College Museum in 2002. He counts 493 members of the R.I.C. killed between 1919 and 1922. Forty-six of them died in Tipperary alone, and thirty-six of those forty-six were Irishmen. Set alongside Lowe’s figures of more than 2,300 Irish-born Black and Tans and our understanding of military policing in Ireland during this time changes significantly. This was, to a substantial degree, a war in which Irishmen killed Irishmen, regardless of their uniform.

This brutality was not strictly one-sided. In April 1921, the IRA abducted John Reilly on suspicion of being an ex-soldier mixing with the Black and Tans. James Quinn, a member of the firing party, recounted the execution thirty-four years later:

about three yards away from our target and, on orders from Paddy Maher, I think, we fired about three rounds per man. Reilly fell back dead and he was then anointed by the priest who witnessed the execution. A label bearing the words: ‘Spy. Executed by the IRA’ was then tied to his body which was left on the spot where he was shot.

Quinn never knew the evidence against Reilly, stating, “My part in his execution was simply in compliance with instructions issued by my superior officer.” The priest, Father O’Kennedy, offered a grimly detailed account:

The man that seemed to be the leader came up to me and saluted. He had his hat low over his eyes and some black stuff on the lower part of his face. He said ‘this man is a convicted spy and is going to be shot’. They then retired about 12 yards and left me with him, guarding us carefully. I then ministered to him. I left Reilly kneeling and intimated to the men that he was ready. They advanced and formed a part circle round him. One man then blindfolded him and pinned some paper to his back. Then they fired a volley into him at about three paces distance. The prisoner uttered a groan after he fell over. Then about four men fired shots at him. Then I anointed him

Ultimately, such trauma laid a foundation for future violence, bleeding into the subsequent Civil War and echoing decades later during the Troubles.

Consequences

When the R.I.C. disbanded in 1922, its former constables discovered they were pariahs. The Metropolitan Police commissioner bluntly refused to make his force “a place of refuge for RIC men.” whilst former colonies like Canada and Australia rejected them. In the Commons, Sir J. Butcher highlighted their absurd predicament:

we say to these men, you may become prison warders or go into private employment or do anything in the world for which you have no training, but if you do the one thing for which you have been trained you will suffer in your pocket.

Staying in Ireland was worse for these men. On 23rd May 1922 three men called at a house near Newport in County Tipperary where the recently disbanded Sergeant John Walshe was visiting his wife and three children. They said he was wanted at the barracks. He came to the door and was shot dead. No members of the public attended his removal, and no inquest could be held because the jurors refused to attend.

In the north, a different solution had already been instituted. In September 1920 the British government authorised a special constabulary in Northern Ireland precisely so that Black and Tans and Auxiliaries would not have to be deployed there. The Ulster Special Constabulary eventually numbered over 24,000 men, was almost entirely Protestant, and overlapped heavily with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The colonial police model that Britain was in the process of abandoning in the south would be maintained, and intensified, in the north for the next fifty years.

In London, Winston Churchill had a use for the rest of them. In the autumn of 1921 he asked Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen to “ascertain from him privately what sort of arrangement would enable us, in the event of an Irish peace, to take over a couple of Black and Tan companies.” Palestine’s garrison was costing more than the Colonial Office could bear, and the mandate’s own police could not be trusted with intercommunal work. Within months, seven hundred and sixty men would be aboard a ship out of Plymouth and bound for the Middle East.

Part 2 follows the Black and Tans to Haifa in April 1922, and the ordinances they policed under to 1948, and the legacy they left behind today.

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Sources

• Borgonovo, John, and Gabriel Doherty. “Smoking Gun? British Government Policy and RIC Reprisals, Summer 1920.” History Ireland 17, no. 2 (March–April 2009): 36–39.

• Boyce, D. G. Englishmen and Irish Troubles: British Public Opinion and the Making of Irish Policy, 1918–1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972.

• Brewer, John D. The Royal Irish Constabulary: An Oral History. Antrim: Institute of Irish Studies, 1990.

• Dolan, Anne. “Death in the Archives: Witnessing War in Ireland, 1919–1921.” Past and Present 253, no. 1 (November 2021): 271–300.

• Duff, Douglas V. Sword for Hire: The Saga of a Modern Free-Companion. London: John Murray, 1934.

• Gaughan, J. Anthony, ed. The Memoirs of Constable Jeremiah Mee, R.I.C. Dublin: Anvil Books, 1975.

• Harvey, A. D. “Who Were the Auxiliaries?” The Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 665–69.

• Hopkinson, Michael, ed. The Last Days of Dublin Castle: The Diaries of Mark Sturgis. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.

• Leeson, D. M. The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

• Leeson, D. M. “Select Document: The Prescott-Decie Letter.” Irish Historical Studies 38, no. 151 (May 2013): 511–22.

• Lowe, W. J. “Who Were the Black-and-Tans?” History Ireland 12, no. 3 (2004): 47–51.

• Reynolds, John. 46 Men Dead: The Royal Irish Constabulary in County Tipperary 1919–22. Cork: Collins Press, 2016.

• Townshend, Charles. The British Campaign in Ireland, 1919–1921. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

• Royal Irish Constabulary personnel registers, The National Archives, Kew, HO 184.

• Military courts of inquiry in lieu of inquests, The National Archives, Kew, WO 35/146a–163.

• Cabinet conference notes, 23 July 1920, The National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/109.

• RIC circulars, The National Archives, Kew, HO 184/126.

• Prescott-Decie to assistant under-secretary, 1 June 1920. National Archives of Ireland, Crime Special Branch Other Papers, Box 24.

• Quinn, James. Witness Statement 1073, Bureau of Military History, Military Archives of Ireland.

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If there is no such thing as society, but only individuals and families oriented by markets and morals, then there is no such thing as social power generating hierarchies, exclusion, and violence.

-Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

Over the course of this series, we have examined the origins of Thatcher’s neoliberal project, surmised with her infamous remark in 1987 that“There is no such thing as society.” We argued that this was a summary, and a clear articulation of a political project that had been running since 1979 with an intellectual architecture that had been assembled by Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley, and their circle in the preceding years. By examining the effect of this program in the context of the Miners’ strikes, we explored the opposition to the planned dismantling of community cohesion in favour of the family as as the fundamental social and economic unit. We expanded this analysis along geographic lines where, under Thatcher’s ideology, a more distinct North/…

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The luxury apartments, with their Porsches behind security gates, stand right next to decaying council tower blocks and flats, into which no money at all has been put. The sense of community built up over years is being almost tangibly destroyed.

Michael Jacobs, Economic and Political Weekly, 1988

In Part 1 of this series, we traced the intellectual architecture of Thatcherism, that being the plan built by Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley, and their neoliberal inner circle. In Part 2, we followed that plan to its most violent confrontation: the miners’ strike of 1984–85, and the women whose organising held the coalfield communities together while the state worked to break them. Part 3 examines Thatcher’s neoliberalism through its most visible physical expression - the inequality of geography in Britain.

In many ways Thatcherism drew new dividing lines in the physical fabric of British society: be it through the closure of factories and the opening of trading floors, the demolition of council estates and the conversion of riverside warehouses into luxury flats, or in the haemorrhaging of jobs from the industrial North and the explosion of wealth in the financial industries of the South. This new map of Britain was, as the geographer Ray Hudson argues, the deliberate product of this political project. He explains:

The election of Mrs Thatcher in 1979 and the new Conservative government heralded a sea change in politics and political strategy in the UK, as the emphasis switched from ‘One Nation’ to ‘Two Nation’ politics, centred on a version of neoliberal economic policy that regarded inequality as part of the inevitable natural order of ‘healthy capitalism’.

This is the story of how Thatcherism remade the geography of Britain and of one place, in one corner of East London, where both halves of the new map were visible on the same street.

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Two Nations

The North-South divide has been part of British political and social identity for so long that it has become ingrained in the national psyche. It shows up in election-night broadcasts, in regional GDP tables and Financial Times infographics about life expectancy. It is invoked so routinely that it has stopped sounding like a description of something that was done and started sounding like a description of something that simply is: a fact of geography, like urbanisation or environmental migration.

Hudson’s work is highly instructive as it exposes this divide as unnatural, as a phenomenon that did not occur just because. The shift from One Nation to Two Nation ideology is the key. Under the post-war settlement, regional inequality had been treated as a problem, as something governments should spend money and political capital to correct. Under Thatcherism, regional inequality was reclassified. It was a feature, not a bug. Hudson argues this Two Nation approach:

… sought to promote ‘Victorian values’ of self-help and self-reliance and promote entrepreneurialism, self-employment and a ‘property-owning democracy’, widening the ownership of housing via the subsidised sale of Local authority houses to sitting tenants and via selling shares in newly privatised companies at extremely generous prices. At the same time, the Thatcherite project sought to weaken the influence of the Labour Party, not least by the abolition in 1985 of the metropolitan County Councils, which were dominated by (what came to be known as Old) Labour.

When Thatcher’s government lifted restrictions on capital export after 1979, the consequences fell unevenly across the British public. Hudson notes, “Between 1979 and 1986 the UK’s 40 largest manufacturing firms increased their non-UK employment by 125,000 while cutting employment in the UK by 415,000.” The cuts fell disproportionately on the industrial regions of the North - the very same regions where large-scale manufacturing, strong unions, and subsidised council housing had sustained the working-class communities that the Thatcherite project had identified as the semblance of society which must be undone in favour of the family unit. Meanwhile the South boomed. Not necessarily because southern entrepreneurs were more dynamic or southern workers more productive. Rather, the South boomed because the government provided the framework for its success. Defence spending was directed almost exclusively to firms in the South. Even today, 47% of defence spending goes to London & the South. Government R&D contracts, too, went south. Infrastructure investment like airports, roads, and rail went south. The M25 - a billion-pound project serving the London economy was opened by Thatcher in 1986 but had no equivalent in any Northern city. London City Airport was built to serve the new financial district. The Channel Tunnel, signed into treaty the same year, would connect Kent to continental Europe. Defence contracts flowed to British Aerospace in Farnborough and GEC-Marconi in Kent.

Above all, the deregulation of financial services in the Big Bang of October 1986 unleashed a wave of growth in the City of London that generated high-salaried jobs in banking and finance, which in turn generated growth in consumer services, property, and everything that attaches itself to concentrations of new money. Hudson lays out what this means for the standard Thatcherite narrative:

The greater economic success of the “South” was not simply a result of greater success in free markets as a result of more entrepreneurial and risk-taking behaviour in markets... If the “South” was an economically successful enclave, increasingly detached from the rest of the national economy and linked into other global financial centres via flows of money capital and personnel, it was in large part because it floated on a very considerable sea of state support.

The free-market economy of the South-East, held up for decades as the proof that Thatcherite economics worked, was itself a product of state intervention through defence contracts, infrastructure spending, regulatory decisions, and the deliberate concentration of government resources in one part of the country at the expense of another. The government, not the market, chose the South - using the market as its instrument. It then pointed to the result as evidence that markets work.

Meanwhile, the picture in the North was the inverse. As the Thatcher government embarked on its assault on the nationalised industries and on the trade unions that had their power bases there, the effects were felt overwhelmingly in the regions where those industries were concentrated. Coal mining, steel making, shipbuilding: all were heavily concentrated in the North, in Scotland, in South Wales. The closures that followed the miners’ strike were not isolated events. They were part of a wider programme of rationalisation that treated each nationalised industry as a target to be weakened, shrunk, and then sold off as a much smaller private-sector rump.

The communities left behind had no replacement economy to fall back on. Hudson describes: “former coal-mining areas characterised by high and long-term unemployment, statistically disguised as the government used a combination of redundancy schemes and greater numbers of people on long-term sickness rather than unemployment benefits to reduce the numbers of registered unemployed.” These disguised figures produced a map of Britain in which the headline unemployment figures looked manageable while the reality in the coalfields and steel towns was catastrophic. A dividing line was emerging between London & the South East, and the rest of the country. A division which remains today and has informed the political choices of the electorate and successive governments.

Kent Worcester, writing in the World Policy Journal in 1989 while Thatcher was still in office, described a polity “often described as being divided along ‘North-South’ lines [in which] southern Wales, Scotland, and northern England [were] disproportionately hurt by deindustrialization and high unemployment.” Worcester noted that the government had “begun to redraw the social and political map of Britain” and that the redrawing was sustained by North Sea oil revenue, which “financed increased spending on law and order and unemployment insurance.” The oil money was not used to invest in the regions that the programme was destroying. It was used to manage the political consequences of the destruction; to pay for the dole, and for the police who would be needed when communities on the dole began to break down.

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London Docklands

Especially visible on this new redrawn map of British society was London’s Docklands. Michael Jacobs, writing in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1988, provides the most detailed contemporary account of what the Thatcher government’s flagship urban regeneration project actually looked like on the ground. His reporting provides a stark, if not angered, account of the moment when the two halves of Thatcherite Britain were placed side by side in a single square mile of East London. The London Docklands Development Corporation had been established in 1981 with a specific mandate: to bypass local government and bring private capital into the decaying docklands of the East End. The area, once the heart of cockney life and the centre of Britain’s maritime trade, had been devastated by the containerisation revolution and the shift of shipping to cheaper ports. Thousands of dock workers had lost their jobs. The communities that remained were poor, predominantly working-class, and represented by Labour councils. The LDDC was designed, explicitly, to go over the heads of those councils.

Jacobs describes what the LDDC built:

The LDDC has indeed transformed docklands, but in a highly controversial way. First, it has unleashed a wave of property development through the conversion of the old riverside warehouses into exclusive luxury apartments. These have been snapped up at astonishing, and spiralling, prices by the new high-salaried “yuppies” of the city’s financial centre just a couple of miles away. Second, a new urban airport for small aircraft has been constructed on derelict dockland, with a new “light railway” into the city. Third, a few commercial premises have been built, including Rupert Murdoch’s “Fortress Wapping” and other newspaper offices.

Jacobs exposes luxury apartments, an airport, and Rupert Murdoch's Fortress Wapping - where he had broken the print unions in 1986, behind razor wire and with police protection, in a confrontation that mirrored the miners' strike.

Scott-Samuel and his colleagues, whose work on the health consequences of Thatcherism has been a running thread through this series, describe what happened to the physical fabric of the Northern communities in terms that connect directly to the housing story Jacobs would tell about Docklands:

All of this had a growing impact on the nature of working-class communities. The better-off council tenants bought the best of the housing, while the younger people who were economically active in the communities were forced out of the sector, leaving the oldest and poorest in the least desirable and often degenerating housing.

The pattern is the mirror image of what was happening in Docklands. In London, the best housing was being converted into luxury apartments for incoming yuppies. In the Northern coalfields, the best council housing was being sold off under Right to Buy to the tenants who could afford the discount, while those who couldn’t (the unemployed, the sick, the old) were left in the residual stock that nobody wanted to buy. In both cases, housing policy was producing a physical separation between the winners and the losers of the Thatcherite programme, inscribed in the built environment of specific streets in specific places.

The controversy, as Jacobs makes clear, was not that the area was being developed. It was that the development had nothing to do with the people who already lived there:

With an annual budget of £60m, none of these initiatives have benefited the local community. The airport is noisy and the new factories have brought traffic. But very few jobs for local people have been created: nearly all have been taken by outsiders. Indeed the net employment impact of the LDDC has been estimated as a loss of 5,000 jobs, due to the high land values which have been created and the subsequent closures of local businesses.

The regeneration agency with a £60 million annual budget had produced fewer jobs than had existed before it arrived. The LDDC’s developments drove up land values, which drove up rents, which drove out the local businesses that had employed local people. The luxury apartments and the City Airport created jobs, but for bankers and pilots and security guards who commuted in, not for the dock workers’ children who were watching their neighbourhood be rebuilt for somebody else. Jacobs continues:

The luxury apartments, with their Porsches behind security gates, stand right next to decaying council tower blocks and flats, into which no money at all has been put. The sense of community built up over years is being almost tangibly destroyed. And the local people have had no say in this process at all. The LDDC is appointed by government ministers, and its planning decisions override those of the elected local council.

In the pursuit of the free-market neoliberal transformation of Britain and British society, Thatcher’s government persisted, up and down the country, in removing agency from local communities either in economic terms or with their political voice.

The LDDC and the other Urban Development Corporations the Thatcher government established across England; in Liverpool, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Manchester, the West Midlands, Leeds, Bristol, and Sheffield, were not, in Jacobs’s analysis, primarily economic instruments. They were political ones. Their defining feature was that they bypassed elected local government. Every one of the inner-city areas where a UDC was established was represented by a Labour council. The UDCs took planning power away from those councils and handed it to appointed boards answerable to central government. Jacobs is explicit about the ulterior motive:

What characterises all of them is that they bypass the powers of elected local governments. Without exception, local governments in the inner cities are Labour. What at first appears bizarre, the simultaneous removal of funds from local councils, and their replacement through Enterprise Zones, Task Forces and UDCs, is in fact part of a single plan to undermine the powers of Labour authorities.

This bypassing of the political agency of regional communities was systematic: cut funding to Labour councils, replace it with centrally appointed bodies, use those bodies to attract private development that brings in wealthier, Conservative-voting residents. Britain’s political map was being redrawn on a generational scale. Jacobs continues:

They will actually create Tory areas. In London’s Docklands, the new private housing for yuppies has turned a safe Labour ward into a Tory marginal. Elsewhere, the sale of municipal houses by Tory councils is driving local residents out as prices escalate, and bringing in wealthy Tory voters to replace them. One Tory inner London borough, Westminster, is actually “deporting” its residents to specially-built estates outside London in order to sell their (refurbished) flats to wealthier people. This process of deliberate “gentrification” is effectively demographic gerrymandering: in last year’s general election two London parliamentary constituencies where over 2,000 council tenants have been replaced by high earners went Conservative after generations of comfortable Labour majorities.

The consequences of this gerrymandering are still visible in the electoral map of London nearly four decades later. Two parliamentary constituencies that had been Labour for generations flipped Conservative after 2,000 council tenants were replaced by high earners. Westminster Council’s “deporting“ of its own residents - moving council tenants to specially built estates outside London in order to sell their refurbished flats to wealthier buyers - would later become the subject of a major legal case. Dame Shirley Porter, the leader of Westminster Council, was found by the district auditor to have pursued a policy of “designated sales“ specifically designed to increase the Conservative vote in marginal wards. She was surcharged £27 million in 1996, later raised to £42 million with interest and costs. She eventually settled in 2004 for £12.3 million, a fraction of the liability. The case confirmed, in court, what Jacobs had described six years earlier: that the reshaping of London’s housing was, at least in part, a deliberate programme of electoral engineering.

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The case of the Docklands is indicative of a broader pattern of inner-city policy under Thatcher. The inner cities were not just places where people happened to be poor. They were, in the Thatcherite vocabulary, places where the “culture of deprivation“ that Keith Joseph had diagnosed in his 1972 speech was most visible. The government’s response, accordingly, was not to invest in the people who lived there but to change the conditions around them and to attract enterprise, promote small business, and above all to bypass the Labour councils that Thatcher regarded as part of the problem.

The results were consistently underwhelming in economic terms. The Enterprise Zones created very few new jobs with some having simply been transferred from elsewhere. The City Action Teams and Task Forces had been given small budgets that they struggled to spend. Even the LDDC’s £60 million annual budget had produced a net loss of employment for local residents. But ideologically, the government was succeeding. Jacobs noted that the Enterprise Agencies had spawned a new movement called Business in the Community, through which large corporations, in pursuit of “corporate social responsibility,“ supported small community projects - a model in which private charity replaced public provision, and in which Prince Charles (now King Charles III), of all people, became the most visible champion of inner-city renewal.

Meanwhile, the government was actively widening the inequality its urban policies were supposed to address. Jacobs records that Nigel Lawson’s 1988 budget “’gave away’ £6 billion in tax cuts, mainly to the top 3 per cent of income earners” at the same time that government aid to inner-city housing was being cut. Defence spending, the government’s largest single influence on the location of employment, was directed almost exclusively to firms in the South-East. Investment grants for firms located in depressed regions were abandoned. The welfare system was overhauled in ways that left millions of the poorest inner-city residents worse off. Jacobs concludes: “Taken overall, it looks suspiciously as if the government has been assisting, not arresting, the decline of the inner cities.” Assisting, not arresting. Jacobs, witnessing this degradation as a contemporary, drew the same conclusion that historian Jim Phillips (cited in Part 2 of this series) would reach twenty-six years later from inside the government’s own filing cabinets: that the Thatcherite programme’s primary goal was not economic efficiency but the redistribution of power and resources upwards, and that the destruction of working-class communities was not a failure of the programme but its mechanism.

The New Map of Britain

Hudson, writing in 2013 - wherein Thatcher’s redrawing of Britain had remained steadfast through the premierships of Major, Blair, Brown, and Cameron - traces the way the geographical divide became self-reinforcing. The housing policies of the 1980s were central to this. Right to Buy, the scheme designed to encourage the private purchase of social housing provision, removed the best council housing stock from the public sector while forbidding councils to reinvest the proceeds in replacement homes. The result, as Hudson describes it, was a rump of increasingly poor-quality public housing into which those who could not afford to buy (often because they were unemployed as a direct result of government economic policies) were concentrated. The gentrification that Jacobs had documented in Docklands spread across London and into other cities, as regeneration programmes replaced working-class residents with middle-class ones and the social geography of Britain’s major urban centres was redrawn.

Hudson explains:

There were areas of residual poor quality social housing, especially in those places blighted by deindustrialisation, which became home to multiply disadvantaged individuals and families, often with two or three generations of unemployed men trapped in places without work. Described in derogatory terms as ‘chavs’, the latter group symbolised the extent to which a multiply disadvantaged fraction of the working class that no longer could find work remained trapped in what were de facto ghettoes, a new form of spatial apartheid.

The pattern was the same everywhere. In the North: deindustrialisation, long-term unemployment disguised as sickness, the erosion of community, and the slow decay of housing and public services that follows when the economic base of a place is removed. In the South: state-supported financial growth, an influx of global capital, property booms, and the creation of a service economy that generated wealth for those at the top and precarious, low-paid work for those at the bottom. In both North and South: widening intra-regional inequality, as the gap between the richest and poorest neighbourhoods within cities grew as fast as the gap between regions.

The election of New Labour in 1997 did not reverse the map. Blair’s government accepted the fundamental terms of the Thatcherite settlement and, in some respects, reinforced them. The banking and financial services sector remained the centrepiece of economic strategy. The regional development agencies that were created operated within the same market-oriented framework. The geographical divide persisted and, by some measures, widened further. Hudson writes: “The most likely future scenarios suggest that spatial inequalities are more likely to widen further and that Margaret Thatcher’s legacy will remain firmly etched in the map of inequality of a Divided Kingdom.”

Indeed the legacy of this divided kingdom has produced ever wider inequalities which have compounded geographic and class divisions, nurturing despair, anger, and unrest among its victims. Thatcher’s map of inequality for Britain persists in poorly constructed ‘new-build’ housing, astronomic house prices and rents, in planning permissions, in the location of jobs, in the quality of schools and the life expectancy of the people who live in one postcode rather than another. It is drawn in the fact that a boy born in Blackpool today can expect to live to 73 - a full decade less than a boy born in the wealthiest parts of the South-East, according to the latest ONS data. At the neighbourhood level the gap is even starker: men in Bloomfield ward on Blackpool’s seafront live, on average, to 67 - barely fifteen months past their state pension age. The places that voted Leave in 2016 are, with remarkable precision, the same places that lost their industries in the 1980s: the former coalfields, the former steel towns, the former docklands communities that the LDDC’s Porsches drove past on their way to their jobs in finance.

The Brexit vote, whatever else it was, was a message from the half of the map that had been drawn out of the national story. The communities Jacobs described in 1988 - the ones that had “no say in this process at all,“ whose elected councils had been bypassed, whose residents had been replaced, whose jobs had been lost to a regeneration programme that regenerated somebody else - voted, thirty years later, for the only option on the ballot paper that sounded like it was addressed to them. “Take Back Control“ spoke to people who had had control taken from them and had never been offered any mechanism, in any election, to get it back. The irony is that the parties they voted - the Conservatives in 2019 and Reform in elections since - are the political inheritors of the project that had drawn the map in the first place.

Effectively narrowing these inequalities, Hudson added, “will certainly require a radically different approach to national economic and social policy.” No such approach has been forthcoming. Levelling Up, Boris Johnson’s signature domestic policy, produced a slogan, a white paper, and almost no measurable change in the geography of inequality. Keir Starmer’s Labour government has not attempted to replace it with anything more ambitious. The political, economic, and social map of Britain that Thatcher’s neoliberalism drew is, in 2026, the Britain we still inhabit.

This is Part 3 of our five-part Deep Dive on Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism, and the design of British inequality. In Part 4, we examine what the inequality of Thatcherism did to the people who lived in it - the excess mortality, the epidemic of long-term sickness, and the GP who went on the record about what the medical profession had done.

If you are reading Consequences for the first time, this is what we do: we examine historical narratives which have shaped our world today and try to understand their impact. Subscribe, and Part 4 will land in your inbox.

We would particularly like to hear from readers who grew up in the places this piece describes - in the Docklands before or after the LDDC, in the Northern cities during the 1980s, or in the inner-city areas where the Enterprise Zones and Task Forces were supposed to bring renewal. What did “regeneration” look like from where you were standing? Leave a comment.

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Sources

• Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal (CMGC), CAB 130/1268, The National Archives, Kew. Referenced via Phillips (2014),.

• Office for National Statistics. “Life Expectancy for Local Areas of the UK: Between 2001 to 2003 and 2022 to 2024.” Statistical bulletin. Released 10 December 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/lifeexpectancyforlocalareasoftheuk/between2001to2003and2022to2024.

• Porter, Dame Shirley. Westminster Council “designated sales” case. District Auditor’s findings and subsequent legal proceedings.

• Hudson, Ray. “Thatcherism and Its Geographical Legacies: The New Map of Socio-Spatial Inequality in the Divided Kingdom.” The Geographical Journal 179, no. 4 (2013): 377–81.

• Jacobs, Michael. “British Inner City Policy.” Economic and Political Weekly 23, no. 31 (1988): 1583–85.

• Phillips, Jim. “Containing, Isolating and Defeating the Miners: The UK Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal and the Three Phases of the 1984–5 Strike.” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 35 (2014): 117–141. [Referenced for continuity with Part 2.]

• Scott-Samuel, Alex, Clare Bambra, Chik Collins, David J. Hunter, Gerry McCartney, and Kat Smith. “The Impact of Thatcherism on Health and Well-Being in Britain.” International Journal of Health Services 44, no. 1 (2014): 53–71.

• Worcester, Kent. “Ten Years of Thatcherism.” World Policy Journal 6, no. 2 (1989): 297–320.

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- Ned Smith, NCB Director of Industrial Relations

Those who remember the 1984–85 miners’ strike will doubtless recall in their minds’ eye Arthur Scargill at the megaphone or mounted police charging a picket line on a June afternoon at Orgreave. These lasting political and cultural moments in British history have their heroes and villains, like Ian Macgregor, the head of the National Coal Board. Much of our common memory of those events have been distorted in the past 40 years to overlook people and communities who were affected beyond the mining towns and localities that were irreversibly devastated.

In Part 1 of this series, we traced the intellectual architecture of Thatcherism as well as the plan assembled by Keith Joseph, Nicholas Ridley, and their circle in the years between 1975 and 1979. We showed that the destruction of Britain’s industrial base was not an unexpected outcome but was its central mechanism: the means by which working-class solidarity would be broken, the trade union movement would be defeated, and the country would be re-moralised according to a neoliberal logic that saw community and collective effort beyond the economic unit of the family as anathema. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 was the greatest test for this neoliberal re-ordering of British industry. In these short but tumultuous years the impact of Thatcherism moved beyond abstracted economic policy to the active destruction of a core element of the British working class community. Beyond the male-dominated narrative of the miners’ strikes lies the experience of the women which sheds light on much more than the politics of industrial action and the economic security that the pits provided to these localities. In exploring the experience of women during the miners’ strikes we see how pervasive neoliberalism and Thatcher were in dismantling communities the length and breadth of Britain.

The strike that began in March 1984 was, to all intents and purposes, a straightforward union dispute over the threat of pit closures. The National Coal Board (NCB), under its new chairman Ian MacGregor (who was appointed in 1983 after a career cutting the labour force at British Leyland and British Steel) had announced a programme of accelerated closures that would eliminate twenty pits and twenty thousand jobs. Previously the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the NCB had engaged in a negotiated approach to pit closures. In 1984, there was no consultation. The NUM, led by Arthur Scargill, called its members out and the country would soon endure two years of upheaval.

Yet this dispute had been instigated years previous. Journalist Susan Ram’s contemporary reporting for the Economic and Political Weekly provides an instructive account of the strike. The battle plans, she wrote, “originated in the mid-seventies, a period which saw the Conservative high command, now in opposition, regrouping under a fresh leadership and mulling over its 1974 humiliation.” It was Lord Carrington, Energy Minister under Heath and later Foreign Secretary in Thatcher’s first Cabinet, who was “first charged with the tasks of evolving a long-term industrial strategy.” In Carrington’s view, Ram reported, “an assault on the concentration of power potentially available to workers in key industries, particularly those organised in strong trade unions, should be high on the agenda of any subsequent Conservative ministry. The strategic public sector mining industry, with its record of union militancy and demolition of governments, appeared a front-runner for attack.”

The miners had brought down Heath’s government in 1974. Thatcher’s circle was deeply conscious of the fact that a repeat could play out under the Tories. The 1977 Ridley Report, leaked to The Economist in May 1978, had laid out in detail how a future Conservative government could provoke and win a confrontation with a major union. The strategy involved stockpiling coal reserves at power stations; converting power stations to dual coal/oil firing; recruiting non-union road haulage firms to move coal and to confound sympathetic action by unionised rail workers; and establishing mobile police units to outmanoeuvre flying pickets. By March 1984, each of these measures was in place.

What the declassified Cabinet papers confirm, thanks to the work of the historian Jim Phillips, who examined the 350-plus pages of minutes from the Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal (CMGC), is that the government’s ambitions went far beyond closing unprofitable pits. Phillips concludes from his investigation of the Cabinet papers:

The CMGC files provide unambiguous evidence that the government’s chief goal in the strike was the removal of effective union representation from the coal industry, with important demonstration effects across the economy more generally.

The ultimate outcome of the Thatcher government’s policy on the miners was the removal of the right of workers to a meaningful voice in the decisions that would determine whether their communities survived. Indeed, it was communicated as necessary policy to include the closure of uneconomic pits, the modernisation of the energy sector and to return public savings. In pursuing the neoliberal aims of the Joseph & Ridley plan the Cabinet and the NCB needed to break the miners, sending every other union in the country a clear message.

Legal frameworks underpinned the government policy to break Miners’ union representation. Brian Towers, writing in the ILR Review in 1989, documented the legislative programme by which Thatcher’s governments had systematically dismantled the legal protections that had made effective industrial action possible in Britain since 1906. The 1982 Employment Act redefined the scope of a lawful trade dispute restricting it to matters “wholly or mainly” concerned with terms and conditions of employment: a move that worked to eliminate solidarity action. Picketing was limited in practice to six persons at each entrance of a stricken workplace. Secondary action, the solidarity strikes and sympathy boycotts that had been central to the miners’ victories in 1972 and 1974, was made effectively illegal. The 1984 Trade Union Act added a requirement for pre-strike ballots. Taken together, these legislative reforms worked in conjunction with other contemporary circumstances. In Towers’ words: “point in particular to the dramatic decline in trade union membership associated with a battery of powerful, negative influences, such as the persistence of high levels of unemployment and major changes in the composition of the labor force.”

Phillips’s analysis of the CMGC minutes reveals a government that operated in three distinct phases. Initially, from March to May, it sought to contain the scale of the strike and its economic effects; then, roughly from May to October, the striking miners were isolated from other groups of unionised workers and inhibited in their construction of broader social and political alliances; and thereafter, Thatcher and her ministers moved to secure their unconditional defeat. Throughout all three phases, the government publicly insisted that the dispute was between the NUM and the NCB; in other words a private industrial matter in which ministers had no role. Phillips describes the Cabinet minutes:

Central to the low-key approach was government non-intervention, with ministers publicly insisting that the dispute was between the NUM and the NCB. This was tenuous, given state ownership of the industry... and the CMGC minutes clearly demonstrate that non-intervention was a fiction.

Thatcher’s government, far from disowning responsibility for the strikes, was micro-managing every dimension of the dispute, be it NCB strategy, negotiations, the back-to-work campaign, the handling of related disputes in the docks and steel, and the conduct of policing. Directives stemmed from twice-weekly Cabinet committee meetings chaired, usually, by the Prime Minister herself.

Ram’s assessment of what happened once the strike began is worth quoting at length, a contemporary, she writes just six months after the miners returned to work:

The strike that began in March 1984 — on the face of it, an uncomplicated union response to the threat of pit closures and the loss of a minimum of 20,000 jobs — handed the government the confrontation it had dreamed of: a defensive strike, begun at the tail-end of winter with coal stocks running at unprecedented levels, in the context of the highest unemployment for half a century. Victory seemed certain, at least to Margaret Thatcher, “within a matter of weeks.”

Thatcher expected a quick victory which ultimately remained elusive. A year-long struggle ensued that tested the government’s resolve, exposed the full machinery of state power, and produced, in the communities where the strike was fought, an extraordinary eruption of collective organisation whose central actors were as much the men on the picket line as the women in the the welfare offices, community kitchens, and the fundraising tours which held the movement together.

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The Women of the Strikes

Jean Spence and Carol Stephenson, writing in International Labor and Working-Class History comprehensively studied women’s role in the strike, through contemporary texts and through reflective interviews conducted two decades later with the women who had lived through it. Their study highlights women in the affected communities as political actors in solidarity with the striking miners.

It is fair to say that the communities directly affected by the strikes were notably patriarchal in nature. The pit was the centre of economic life, and the miners male. As Tony Hall wrote in his 1981 study King Coal, mining communities appeared to outsiders as “objects of legend, mystery and even awe,” as places where “the pit, and the type of work done there dominates lives in a way that few other jobs do. Mining is always uncomfortable and dangerous, and the nature of the work binds men together.” The solidarity and sense of community was innately tied to their economic existence and so too was the gender hierarchy it rested on. Spence and Stephenson describe it as:

The male world of the mine was the beating, economic heart of the local community upon which female life was dependent. Female ‘community work’ was deployed to sustain the affective, fluid relationships between work, local neighbourhood, and family, while male ‘community work’ focused upon the formality of systems and the management of welfare organisations.

Women held the community together just as men ran the institutions that represented it. For all the contemporary and modern interpretations of feminism and female empowerment, that was the settlement that had been in place for generations. The strikes of the mid-1980s went a long way to dismantling this structure, not by design, but by necessity. When the miners stopped working, the money stopped and the local economy necessarily suffered, especially since strikers were not entitled to unemployment benefits. Families that had been getting by on a miner’s wage were suddenly getting by on nothing for up to and beyond a year. Somebody had to ensure they were fed and taken care of since it was clear the State would not do so. Somebody had to organise the soup kitchens, coordinate the donations that were arriving from trade unions and solidarity groups across the country, manage the welfare claims, arrange childcare, and keep the community functioning while its economic base was shut down. That somebody was the women of these communities.

Women’s activism was not merely an extension of their domestic roles. It was a political mobilisation that drew on skills and networks the women had been building independently of the pit for years. “Women built their own organisations,” Spence and Stephenson note, “such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild, and created social networks related to their own unpaid economic activity, such as mat-making, which were collective and home-based but redolent of community nevertheless.” Before the strike, these networks were invisible to the male institutional structure of the NUM. During the strike, they became the infrastructure that kept the communities alive.

Predictably for the time, the NUM wanted the women’s labour but not their agency. Anna Lawson, a miner’s wife from Sacriston in County Durham, described the men’s attitude:

The Sacriston Lodge members were traditional males. They wanted their women to stay at home and they held very specific views about what women could and couldn’t do. Making sandwiches was fine; as long as we didn’t ask to do anything else, their equilibrium was intact. It was such a fight even to get onto the picket line.

Nevertheless, the women got onto the picket line anyway. They solidified their position on stages, in meeting halls, and onto fundraising tours that took miners’ wives from pit villages in Durham and Yorkshire to solidarity rallies in London, Brussels, and New York. Lily Ross, another woman interviewed by Spence and Stephenson, observed a shift in who actually spoke for the community: “When you are talking to a miners’ group, it’s the women who are talking, not the men. The men went to work to get the pennies to bring back to the wives to sort out the problems.”

Ram, reporting from outside Britain, saw clearly what many domestic commentators missed - that the women were not a sideshow but a decisive force:

The ability of an exceptional body of men, backed by their families, by womenfolk whose latent organisational and political talents now bloomed magnificently, by a groundswell of public support that sent a constant flow of funds and sympathy into the embattled mining communities, to deny the government its quick victory is emerging, in retrospect, as a decisive feature of the strike experience.

But the terms on which this activism was accommodated remained constrained throughout the strike. Pat McIntyre, in another of Spence and Stephenson’s interviews, described the double performance the women were required to sustain:

The women... were appealing on behalf of the working class... when they went to other towns and cities. But inside the coalfield they would appeal to people and say “it is nothing to do with the union. It’s us. We are looking after families.” The most unpolitical message you could possibly get.

Pat’s observation flies in the face of the neoliberal agenda laid out in Part 1 of this series - wherein the family was the most important economic unit; the basis on which Thatcher could argue that there was no Society in its conventional understanding. Rather, Pat McIntyre’s interview demonstrates how intrinsically linked the family is to the wider community. Yet there remained a duality in the role of women in the strikes - to be external advocates and yet to maintain their domestic roles. It was, as Spence and Stephenson put it, “a dance of domination and dependence” in which “women activists found themselves performing different subject positions for different audiences.”

Orgreave

While the women were organising the survival of their communities, the state was organising their defeat. Scott-Samuel and his colleagues, whose work on the health consequences of Thatcherism we explored in Part 1, name the wider context:

Thatcherism was not only about the free market and the dominance of private interests, but also the “strong state.” It was an “authoritarian populist” project in which economic liberalism was accompanied by social conservatism and the reassertion of 19th-century (Victorian) moral values.

The miners’ strike was where the strong state came to the fore. On 14 May 1984, two months into the strike, Thatcher spoke in the Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal explicitly about what the government needed to do. It was vital, she said, to “maintain as far as possible the isolation of the miners from the effective support of the rest of the union movement.” The full scale of the state’s mobilisation is difficult to overstate. Towers, writing four years after the event, described a government that had “abandoned its initial non-interventionist stance and undertook a large-scale national mobilisation of its physical, financial, and propagandist resources in direct support of a public sector employer (the National Coal Board), resulting in 1985 in the defeat of, and division within, the National Union of Mineworkers.”

On 18 June 1984, three months into the strike, the NUM called a mass picket at the Orgreave coking plant near Rotherham in South Yorkshire. The plan was to blockade the plant and prevent coke from being delivered to the steelworks at Scunthorpe, replicating the tactic that had succeeded at Saltley Gate in Birmingham in 1972 and forced Heath’s government to concede. Anywhere from five to ten thousand pickets assembled from across the country. They were met by six thousand police officers drawn from forces nationwide, equipped with riot gear, dogs, and mounted officers; a deployment that dwarfed the eight hundred police who had been overwhelmed at Saltley twelve years earlier. The government had learned the lesson of 1972 and had no intention of losing again.

What happened that day is still, forty-two years later, the subject of legal dispute and, as of March 2026, a public inquiry was launched chaired by the Right Reverend Dr Pete Wilcox, Bishop of Sheffield. In 1984, as the lorries began to leave the coking plant, the pickets pushed against the police lines. What followed, in the account of the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, was a rout. In a lull between pushes, with many miners dispersed into the village for refreshments, the officer in charge ordered the police lines to open. Mounted officers charged up the field, followed by snatch squads in riot gear with short shields and truncheons. The miners fled toward a railway embankment, effectively a dead end. The only escape route was over a narrow railway bridge into Orgreave village, where the running confrontation continued through residential streets.

Ninety-five miners were arrested. Somewhere between fifty-five and seventy-one were subsequently charged with riot - an offence that at the time carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by South Yorkshire Police was found to be, in the court’s language, “unreliable.” It emerged that officers had been given direction in the writing of their statements (in other words their testimony was coordinated). In 1991, the force paid £425,000 in compensation to thirty-nine miners for assault, wrongful arrest, and malicious prosecution. Not a single officer was disciplined. Michael Mansfield QC, who acted for some of the miners, called Orgreave “the biggest frame-up ever” and said the force had a culture of fabricating evidence - a culture that was, he argued, not corrected by the time of the Hillsborough disaster five years later. The BBC broadcast footage of the confrontation with the sequence edited so that it appeared the miners had thrown stones before the mounted police charged, rather than after. The Corporation later acknowledged the error. In July 2025, four decades after the event, the government finally announced a public inquiry into the policing of Orgreave. As of this writing, the inquiry is ongoing.

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The declassified CMGC minutes show that the government’s direction of policing during the strike was not limited to Orgreave. Phillips documents one episode that demonstrates the chain of command with unusual clarity. In early May, the NUM had mounted major pickets at the Hunterston coal terminal and Ravenscraig steelworks in Scotland, a combined force of around three thousand miners. The Scottish Office believed these pickets could succeed in halting coal deliveries, in which case production would cease within three days. The CMGC minutes record what happened next:

In discussing the crisis at Ravenscraig on 8 May Ministers asked why Scottish chief constables had not shared the readiness of their English equivalents to stop pickets building up at key pinch points. Thatcher directed the Secretary of State for Scotland to explore this specific question with Scottish chief constables, using public order legislation “to prevent pickets going to the scene of possible disturbances.” The effect was immediate.

Two days later, Strathclyde Police halted 290 miners from West Fife, Clackmannan, and Stirlingshire on the A80 at Stepps, many miles from Ravenscraig and Hunterston. Dozens were arrested and held for hours at different police stations in Glasgow. The PM had directed policing from a Cabinet committee table. The fiction of operational independence was exactly that.

Ray Hudson, the geographer whose work on the spatial legacy of Thatcherism we drew on in Part 1, describes the strike as the most savage expression of the government’s wider strategy. Having “previously tested its approach on the ‘softer’ target of the steel industry, with its occupationally and spatially fragmented unions, and having carefully prepared the ground by building up stocks of coal at the power stations,” Hudson writes, “the government deployed the full panoply of state power — perhaps most graphically displayed in the ‘battle’ of Orgreave — to break the resolve of the National Union of Mineworkers.”

The government also exploited the internal geography of the coalfields. Hudson notes that by “encouraging and supporting the emergence of the Union of Democratic Mineworkers in Nottingham, the government successfully reopened a geographical rift in the union movement in the coal industry itself.” The Nottinghamshire miners, whose pits were newer and more productive and whose jobs were less immediately threatened, broke with the NUM and continued working. The split turned a national strike into a regional one, and it ensured that the solidarity the NUM depended on (the same solidarity that Part 1 of this series showed the Thatcherite circle had identified as the thing that had to be broken) was fractured from within.

The Legacy of the Strikes

The miners went back in March 1985, unbowed, behind their union banners. They had not been beaten in the field but rather outmanoeuvred by the Nottinghamshire split, and overwhelmed by a state that had spent the better part of a decade preparing for exactly this confrontation. The NUM’s assets had been sequestered by the courts in October 1984. On 30 November, the NUM as a legal entity was effectively commandeered. From that point, as Seumas Milne documents in The Enemy Within, the union had to go financially underground to keep the strike going at all - the “extraordinary lengths to which the miners’ leaders went to keep the NUM afloat” would later be weaponised against them in a 1990 press campaign, led by Robert Maxwell’s Daily Mirror and Central Television, that alleged the NUM leadership had embezzled Libyan money. The central allegations were proven false within hours of publication, but the damage had been done. As Milne writes, “the entire funding operation behind the 1984–5 miners’ strike would be brought into the frame and with it, the legitimacy of the strike itself.” The strike was defeated twice: once on the ground, and once in the press, five years after the miners had gone back.

Ned Smith, the NCB’s own industrial relations director and the man whose job it was to negotiate with the miners on behalf of their employer left his own account of what the government was doing. His testimony, quoted by Phillips, carries significant weight:

Smith lamented in his memoir that the government and MacGregor from the summer of 1984 onwards were committed to “the grinding defeat of our employees” and “the dreadful bitterness which that entailed.”

This was not, in Smith’s account, akin to an employer grinding down its own workforce, with the full backing of the state, in the name of a political project whose costs were in Nigel Lawson’s words, considered a “worthwhile investment.” Phillips records the figures: the economic and financial costs of the strike were estimated at £6 billion (£14 billion at 2014 prices) in lost production and tax revenues, replacement coal stocks, additional oil burn, reduced economic activity, and policing charges. The NCB’s pre-strike projected losses for 1984–5 were £100 million. The government spent 140 times what the “uneconomic” pits would have cost to keep open, and called it a worthwhile investment.

In the time following the strikes, the pit closures accelerated. Within a decade of the strike’s end, the coal mining industry in Britain was effectively dismantled. The NUM had argued that more than seventy pits were on the NCB’s list; the declassified Cabinet papers corroborates this. Scargill, for all the criticism directed at his tactics, had been telling the truth about the scale of what was coming. Communities that had been organised around a single industry for generations - whose schools, pubs, welfare halls, football teams, and chapels had all been sustained by the economic input of the pit - saw their lifesource removed.

Ram, writing six months after the strikes, noted that the government’s triumph had not translated into political advantage. Thatcher’s Conservatives had fallen to third place in the polls, supported by barely 30 per cent of the electorate. Ram described a leadership style that was “abrasive, hectoring, inflexible and dismissive of dissent” and a government that had “demonstrated over recent months a singular capacity for self-inflicted wounds.” The first post-strike budget offered a characteristically Thatcherite response to mass unemployment: an attempt to abolish the wages councils that had, since the reformist Liberal ministry of 1909–1914, set a statutory minimum below which the wages of the most vulnerable British workers could not fall. Even British business protested and the government eventually backed down.

But the damage to the coalfield communities was a policy with a long reaching legacy. Hudson describes that the former coalfield areas were characterised by “high and long-term unemployment, statistically disguised as the government used a combination of redundancy schemes and greater numbers of people on long-term sickness rather than unemployment benefits to reduce the numbers of registered unemployed.” The miners who lost their jobs were not counted as unemployed and instead reclassified as sick to work up the unemployment figures. In no way did this help the communities reeling from economic devastation.

Phillips’s conclusion, drawing on the work of the economists Beatty and Fothergill, connects the statistics surrounding the fallout from the strikes with real human experience. Among all men of working age in Great Britain in 1991, the official measure of unemployment was 10.4 per cent but the “real” level - including those reclassified as permanently sick - was 14.9 per cent. In the coalfields of England, Wales and Scotland the picture was far worse: official unemployment stood at 12.4 per cent, but the real rate was 22.5 per cent. Nearly one in four working-age men in the former coalfields was out of work, and the government had arranged the statistics so that most of them did not appear in the headline figure.

Scott-Samuel and his colleagues describe what this meant for the communities left behind:

All of this had a growing impact on the nature of working-class communities. The better-off council tenants bought the best of the housing, while the younger people who were economically active in the communities were forced out of the sector, leaving the oldest and poorest in the least desirable and often degenerating housing. As the relative value of benefits fell, and as wage rates for increasingly insecure and feminized, unskilled work were held down, the poorest were becoming poorer and increasingly “socially excluded,” blamed, and stigmatized for policy outcomes that the government had in fact fully anticipated in resolving to “go through with it.”

Blamed and stigmatised for policy outcomes the government had fully anticipated in resolving to “go through with it.” Meanwhile, in the inner cities, the social fabric was tearing in a different way. In the autumn of 1985, months after the miners returned to work, violence erupted in Handsworth, Brixton, and Tottenham - areas where, as the Economic and Political Weekly reported at the time, unemployment rates among Black youth had reached 40 per cent in some districts, and where the government’s response to the 1981 Scarman Report had amounted to cosmetic changes while the underlying conditions of deprivation and racial disadvantage worsened. The Scarman Report had warned, three years earlier, that “where deprivation and frustration exist to such an extent... the possibility of disorder must therefore be strong.” The government had accepted the report’s findings and ignored its recommendations.

The connection between the coalfields and the inner cities is not incidental. Both were places where the Thatcherite programme had removed the economic base on which communities depended and then reframed the resulting distress as a cultural problem and a failure of individual responsibility rather than a consequence of policy. In the coalfields, the cycle-of-deprivation theory we examined in Part 1 was sped up. In the inner cities, the government pointed to crime, drug trafficking, and what it called “copycat violence” triggered by television reports from South Africa. In both cases, the structural explanation (that communities from which work and public investment have been systematically withdrawn will eventually break down) went overlooked.

Ram described the deprivation that followed:

The most visible indicator of economic failure remains the ever-lengthening dole queues that seem emblematic of Thatcherite Britain... For the young worker in particular, as well as for those in “peripheral” regions — the substantial areas of South Wales, Scotland, the north of England and Northern Ireland deeply scarred by recession and the redundancy of entire communities — there seems no prospect at all of a working stake in their society.

One could be forgiven for thinking Ram was describing Britain today.

The government spent more on welfare for displaced miners than it would have cost to keep the pits open, because the point was never saving money. The point was breaking the right of workers to have a voice in the decisions that shaped their lives. In that objective, Thatcher succeeded.

Although, Spence and Stephenson’s research tells a different story about the legacy of the strikes:

Community is an emotive concept, which serves both conservative and progressive purposes. Within it the implications for gender relations are seldom analysed. The enactment of community through the miners’ strike, drawing on representations, experiences, memories, hopes, and imagination of what a community could be, situated female action at a pivotal political conjuncture in which a series of hitherto fixed gender dichotomies were thrown into flux.

The women’s support groups that had formed during the strike did not disband when the men returned to work. Many continued as community organisations, welfare advocacy groups, and political networks that sustained the coalfield communities through the decades of deindustrialisation that followed. The skills the women had acquired, in public speaking, fundraising, negotiation, media work, and the management of collective resources under extreme pressure, did not disappear when the strike ended. They were redeployed into the long, unglamorous work of keeping a community alive after its economic base had been removed.

The mining community as it had existed before 1984 was, by Spence and Stephenson’s account, a deeply gendered structure in which women’s labour was essential but women’s agency was constrained. The strike began to dismantle this structure although it did not create equality (indeed the patriarchal nature of the NUM was never fully overcome) but it created a space in which women could act politically while publicly performing domesticity, could organise collectively while being told their activism was not political, and could sustain a community under siege using skills that the community’s own institutional structures had never acknowledged they possessed. The thing the Thatcherite programme was trying to destroy - that being the “society” that Thatcher said did not exist and the collective solidarity that the neoliberal project identified as the enemy of the self-reliant family - turned out, in the coalmining communities, to be sustained by the female networks of the welfare offices and Women’s Co-operative Guilds, just as much as the NUM and the men on the picket lines.

The consequences of the strike did not end in 1985. They are still being measured in the health data of the former coalfields, in the voting patterns of the 2016 referendum, and in the long-term sickness statistics that Des Spence described in the BMJ (to be examined in a future installment of this Deep Dive series). The communities that were broken by the strike have never truly been rebuilt. They were left to manage their own decline, using the language of self-reliance that the government insisted upon through their policy agenda. Wendy Brown describes the world those communities’ grandchildren now inhabit:

Today’s deproletarianized and deunionized workers enter the “sharing” and “contract” economy, where they transform their possessions, time, connections, and selves into sources of capitalization. By leasing out rooms on Airbnb, driving for Lyft or Uber, Task Rabbit freelancing, bike, tool, and car sharing, or simply managing a variety of part-time or short-term sources of income (”side hustles”), individuals and households aim to survive economic cutbacks and downturns.

The miners had solidarity, unions, collective bargaining, and a welfare state that was supposed to catch them. Their grandchildren are now reliant on side hustles having been asked to weather the storm of COVID, rising cost of living, global conflict, climate change, and domestic political ineptitude with that same expectation of self-reliance. Nearly one million young people are Not in Employment Education or Training (NEETs) and more than half of the rise in 16- to 64-year-olds claiming disability benefits since the pandemic is due to more claims relating to mental health or behavioural conditions. A recent DWP survey suggests 86% of incapacity and disability benefit claimants report having a mental health condition (even if it is not their primary condition). Whilst many other social and political factors have influenced this stark reality, for many communities across the UK the origins of this deprivation begins with the strikes in the 1980s.

Indeed, the women who held those communities together during the strike found themselves, in the decades that followed, holding together something smaller: families without incomes, streets without services, towns without futures.

This is Part 2 of our five-part Deep Dive on Margaret Thatcher, neoliberalism, and the design of British inequality. If you are reading Consequences for the first time, this is what we do: we examine historical narratives which have shaped our world today and try to understand their impact. Subscribe, and Part 3 will land in your inbox.

We would particularly like to hear from readers with connections to mining communities - whether you lived through the strike, grew up in its aftermath, or have watched the places it was fought in change over the decades since. Your stories are the thing most histories leave out. Leave a comment.

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Sources

• Lawson, Anna. Written interview response. In Spence and Stephenson, “’Side by Side with Our Men?,’” 2009.

• McIntyre, Pat. Interview. In Spence and Stephenson, “’Side by Side with Our Men?,’” 2009.

• Ross, Lily. Interview. In Spence and Stephenson, “’Side by Side with Our Men?,’” 2009.

• Scarman, Lord. The Brixton Disorders 10–12 April 1981: Report of an Inquiry. London: HMSO, 1981. Cmnd. 8427.

• Ridley, Nicholas. Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy Group (the “Ridley Report”). Leaked to The Economist, 27 May 1978.

• Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal (CMGC), CAB 130/1268, The National Archives, Kew. Cited via Phillips (2014).

• Thatcher, Margaret. Speech to 1922 Committee (”the enemy within”), 19 July 1984. Margaret Thatcher Foundation, document 105563.

• Smith, Ned. The 1984 Miners’ Strike: The Actual Account. Whitstable, 1997. Quoted via Phillips (2014).

• Phillips, Jim. “Containing, Isolating and Defeating the Miners: The UK Cabinet Ministerial Group on Coal and the Three Phases of the 1984–5 Strike.” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 35 (2014): 117–141.

• Ram, Susan. “British Politics in Wake of Miners’ Strike: Margaret Thatcher’s Troubled Legacy.” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 37 (1985): 1552–53.

• Scott-Samuel, Alex, Clare Bambra, Chik Collins, David J. Hunter, Gerry McCartney, and Kat Smith. “The Impact of Thatcherism on Health and Well-Being in Britain.” International Journal of Health Services 44, no. 1 (2014): 53–71.

• Spence, Jean, and Carol Stephenson. “’Side by Side with Our Men?’ Women’s Activism, Community, and Gender in the 1984–1985 British Miners’ Strike.” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 75 (2009): 68–84.

• Towers, Brian. “Running the Gauntlet: British Trade Unions under Thatcher, 1979–1988.” ILR Review 42, no. 2 (1989): 163–88.

• “Victims of Thatcherism.” Economic and Political Weekly 20, no. 41 (1985): 1717–18.

• Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

• Hall, Tony. King Coal: Miners, Coal and Britain’s Industrial Future. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

• Hudson, Ray. “Thatcherism and Its Geographical Legacies: The New Map of Socio-Spatial Inequality in the Divided Kingdom.” The Geographical Journal 179, no. 4 (2013): 377–81.

• Milne, Seumas. The Enemy Within: The Secret War Against the Miners. 4th ed. London: Verso, 2014.

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This is the final piece in a three-part series on corporate complicity in state violence. Part one examined the corporations that played pivotal roles in facilitating the Holocaust and partnered with the Nazi regime; with little …

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Time magazine, July 1966. The cover shows a smiling General Suharto, the Indonesian military leader who had spent the previous nine months presiding over the killing of somewhere between half a million and a million of his fellow citizens. The cover line, by way of editorial framing, called the slaughter “the West’s best news for years in Asia.” At the time of publication, this was not considered controversial. The Cuban Missile Crisis was only five years previous, and the reflexive Cold War framing of any blow against Communism - even one delivered through paramilitary death squads - was that of welcome strategic relief. Western corporations operating in Indonesia greeted the news the same way. They had, in many cases, helped to engineer it.

This is the second piece in a three-part series on corporate complicity in state violence. Part One examined corporate complicity with Nazi Germany. In Germany many corporation…

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“Colonial endeavours and their associated genocides have historically been driven and enabled by the corporate sector.”

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide (2025)

History records the architects of mass atrocity but rarely considers the mundane bureaucracy that underpins their work. What of the underwriters, the engineers, the contract managers - the administrators of genocide? Consider Max Baier of the early twentieth century. Baier was a sub-inspector at the insurance firm Allianz. An "Old Fighter" of the Nazi movement, he operated from theircentral office in Berlin where he handled policies on a portfolio of government clients that included the SS facilities at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. Historian Gerald Feldman explains:

Allianz and a consortium of insurance companies were involved in insuring the factories in nearly all the external camps of the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Allianz also insured the…

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“There is no point undertaking it if we are not prepared to go through with it.”

- Nicholas Ridley, later the Lord Ridley of Liddesdale, an instrumental figure in supporting Thatcher’s program for government in 1979.

Thatcher is often quoted as saying that there is no such thing as society. In interview with Douglas Keay for Women’s Own in 1987 In fact, her actual words were a far more damning indictment:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

Thatcher's comments are characterised by an ideological shift in Britain which has delivered wide-reaching inequities to this day. Many people today have problems which the Government is simply incapable of coping with. There are fewer grants, more homelessness - roughly 25,000 households in 1987 compared to 135,000 households in 2025, including over 170,000 children.

But Thatcher’s famous “no such thing” statement belies a deeper, more insidious permeation of neoliberal ideology through the social and political landscape of Britain spanning decades. Much more important than Thatcher’s musings on the existence of society as we conventionally understand it, Conservative politicians in the years between 1975 and 1979 played a pivotal role in building the Britain we live in today. Nicholas Ridley, quoted above, was an old Etonian, engineer, MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury, a junior minister under Heath who had resigned over the U-turn - Heath’s abandonment of the free-market, non-interventionist economic policy on which he had been elected. Ridley, plotting with Thatcher and her closest intellectual ally Keith Joseph, was describing a plan whose consequences he could reasonably have foreseen. As public health scholars Alex Scott-Samuel and colleagues explain, the plan “was fully understood by those who developed [it] for their implementation in Britain. Whole towns — indeed, entire regions — would see the decimation of their economic bases and would become ‘severely deprived.’”

It is a clear illustration of the political project that was about to take power in Britain. The men and women who designed Thatcherism knew that their project would compound social inequities in the pursuit of ideological aims grounded in a deep sense of individualism. Ridley, Joseph, and Thatcher had considered the scale of the disruption to social cohesion - politically, morally, electorally - and they had concluded that it would be surmountable, provided they did not flinch. Ridley’s sentiment is that, should they lose their nerve in the third year when the dole queues are at three million and the papers are full of factory closures, then their plan for a redesign of Britain should fail. The only way the plan would work, is if they see it through.

Indeed, they did.

This is Part 1 of our Deep Dive series on the legacy of Thatcher and neoliberalism in Britain. In this instalment we explore what the plan was, how it was built by Thatcher and her inner circle in the late 1970s, and who bore the brunt of the upheaval. We trace why the Britain of 2026 - with its widening inequalities, its hollowed-out industrial regions, its worsening health outcomes, its politics of grievance that can find enemies but cannot build anything - is the country that Thatcher’s plan produced. This series seeks to unearth Thatcherism as much more than a series of pragmatic responses to a country in crisis. It was a coherent design, executed by a small group of people who had agreed among themselves that a certain scale of deliberate damage was the price to be paid for the country they wanted to build.

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The making of Thatcherism

The process by which Thatcherism was constructed can be understood through various lenses. Notably, the Centre for Policy Studies, founded by Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman in 1974, played a critical role. But the mind of Keith Joseph, in particular, is a vital component in the formation of Thatcher’s neoliberal ideology. Joseph’s position developed during the summer of 1974, when he took a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty on holiday to Fife and, in his own phrase, spent the recess “steeping myself in Hayek.“

A case could be made that Keith Joseph most fully embodied the fusion of moral conviction with economic theory that Thatcherism would become. In the early days of her rise to prominence, Thatcher herself deferred to Joseph intellectually, in a way she did not defer to anyone else. Just as Thatcher was the politician, Joseph was the theorist. Joseph’s take on neoliberalism helped to develop Thatcherism as a coherent project which was ultimately held together by the force of Thatcher’s personality.

Before we can understand what Joseph gave Thatcher, though, we have to be clear about the underpinnings of neoliberalism, a political philosophy commonly associated with a preference for free markets, low taxes, and light-touch regulation. For Thatcher that meant minimising ‘The Nanny State’. At times, Neoliberalism is described as the belief that private enterprise allocates resources more efficiently than the state. From this we can extract Thatcher’s program of privatisation. Both of these interpretations are true, but incomplete. Wendy Brown comprehensively interrogates the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of neoliberalism in her 2019 book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism - examining how it paved the way for the rise in antidemocratic politics across the Western world.

Neoliberalism, Brown argues, is not primarily an economic doctrine at all. It is a political rationality - a system of thought that exports the logic of the market into every other sphere of human life, until schools, hospitals, benefits offices, family life, and the interior life of the individual all begin to operate as though they were markets and the people inside them were firms. Her argument, built on Foucault’s address in his 1978–79 Collège de France lectures states:

In this rationality, market principles become governing principles applied by and to the state, but also circulating through institutions and entities across society — schools, workplaces, clinics, etc. These principles become saturating reality principles governing every sphere of existence and reorienting homo oeconomicus itself, transforming it from a subject of exchange and the satisfaction of needs (classical liberalism) to a subject of competition and human capital enhancement (neoliberalism). At the same time, according to Foucault, the neoliberals formulated competitive markets as necessitating political support and thus a novel form of what Foucault calls “governmentalizing” the state. In the new governmental rationality, on the one hand, all governing is for markets and oriented by market principles, and on the other hand, markets must be built, facilitated, propped up, and occasionally even rescued by political institutions. Competitive markets are good, but not exactly natural or self-sustaining.

The driving sentiment is saturation. Neoliberalism insists that the logic of the market is the only rational way to organise anything at all. A school is evaluated by how well it prepares its pupils for the labour market. A hospital is evaluated by its throughput. A council estate is evaluated by the market value of the houses that could be built if it were knocked down. A citizen is evaluated by the return on investment they represent to themselves and to the economy. Even the family (the one non-market institution Thatcher’s circle was determined to protect) is reconceived, under neoliberalism, as a kind of small firm whose job is to produce disciplined workers for the labour market and to absorb the costs of anyone who cannot compete.

Brown explains that neoliberalism relies on a certain sense of human capital. Under neoliberalism, you are not a citizen with rights. You are not a worker with solidarity. You are a portfolio of self-investments, a bundle of skills, qualifications, health indicators, and lifestyle choices whose value you are obliged to maintain and, ideally, to increase. Brown, drawing again on Foucault and on the French theorist Michel Feher, describes what this transformation asks of an ordinary human life:

Entrepreneurialization, or what the French and British called “responsibilization,” produces a subject that Foucault termed “a multitude of enterprises” or what, in its financialized form, Michel Feher calls a “portfolio of self-investments” designed to maintain or enhance human capital value. This portfolio includes child care, education, health, appearance, and old age provisions.

With careful note, we see health, education, childcare, and old age provisions are all the things the post-war British welfare state had previously taken as collective responsibilities. These are aspects of social life that the Post-War consensus had decided would be provided to everyone as a matter of shared entitlement. Under neoliberalism, every one of them is transferred back to the individual and the family, reframed as a personal project, and assessed according to whether the individual has made the right investments in themselves. If you are old and poor, you invested badly in your pension. If you are sick, you invested badly in your health. If your children are struggling, you invested badly in their education. Brown neatly surmises:

If belief in the social and political stewardship of society is what takes us down this path, then society must be dismantled. In actually existing neoliberalism, this dismantling takes place on many fronts. Epistemologically, dismantling society involves denying its existence, as Thatcher did in the 1980s.

This is what the Woman’s Own interview was for. Thatcher was calling out the epistemological move that Brown says is the signature of the wider neoliberal project: the move by which the very idea of the social is denied, so that the collective actions a society might take to correct its own inequalities become, by definition, impossible to discuss. You cannot argue for the social good if there is no such thing as society.

What Brown’s analysis exposes, and what the standard economic reading of Thatcher misses, is that the stakes of this dismantling are much higher than the question of whether a particular service is publicly or privately provided. The social, Brown argues, is not just a set of institutions. It is the conceptual space in which a democracy recognises itself as something more than a marketplace and as something more than a collection of families. It is where equality lives. Brown states: “The social is where we, as individuals or a nation, practice or fail to practice justice, decency, civility, and care beyond the codes of market instrumentalism and familialism. And it is where political equality, essential to democracy, is made or unmade.”

What Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher and Alfred Sherman were building in the late 1970s makes more sense once Brown’s framework is considered. The traditional reading of their project, summarised neatly by historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, is that it was a cynical power grab dressed up in free-market rhetoric. Summarising the work of the political scientist Jim Bulpitt, Sutcliffe-Braithwaite explains:

The New Left painted Thatcherism as an unholy alliance of neo-liberal economics with resurgent Conservative rhetoric in a power-grabbing project with hegemonic pretensions. Political scientist Jim Bulpitt argued that monetarism was a mere secondary instrument in power hungry Thatcherite ‘statecraft’. These studies have fostered a pervasive sense that Thatcherism cannot add up to a coherent and consistent ideology. Some historians have, therefore, analysed it in the context of the abiding Conservative impetus for power. This perspective sees Thatcherism as moulded by the economic pressures, political manoeuvres, and electoral imperatives of its time, and hears its distinctive rhetoric as a stitch-up of incompatible policies and platitudes designed to appeal to the rich, to ‘middle England’, and to ‘Essex man’.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite finds this interpretation misleading, and with good reason. Her argument, supported by Brown's, is that Thatcherism was not a set of economic policies wrapped in moral rhetoric for electoral purposes. Thatcher's was a moral project whose economic policies were a method of delivery. "Though Thatcherites took ideas from diverse sources," she writes, "their political project had a single guiding purpose: the moral (and, secondarily, economic) rejuvenation of Britain." The form this moral project took in Britain was shaped by a cycle-of-deprivation theory, a Methodist horror of dependency, and an invocation of Victorian virtues.

Stuart Hall, writing in Marxism Today in January 1979 - four months before Thatcher took office - saw something most of his contemporaries missed. What was emerging, Hall argued, was not merely a swing to the right but a new political form entirely: “an exceptional form of the capitalist state” which he called “authoritarian populism,” one “which at the same time has been able to construct around itself an active popular consent.” Hall was describing a project that did not simply impose itself on the country but recruited the country into its own transformation - one that made ordinary people feel that the erosion of their collective protections was, somehow, in their own interest.

Cycles of deprivation

In 1972, Keith Joseph delivered a speech to the Pre-School Playgroups Association - women and especially mothers whose focus was with the welfare of children under five. The speech is worth attending to in its original form, because the standard caricature of Joseph as a man indifferent to the poor does not bear out in the text. Rather than indifferent, his stance on deprivation and the family unit was wholeheartedly sincere and thus far more damaging. He opened:

Why is it that, in spite of long periods of full employment and relative prosperity and the improvement in community services since the Second World War, deprivation and problems of maladjustment so conspicuously persist? Indeed some would say that they have actually increased. This is a paradox to those who hoped that they would dwindle as standards of consumption and health and education rose.

By 1972 the post-war settlement was nearly thirty years old. The NHS had been free at the point of use for a generation. Comprehensive education was being rolled out. Council housing accounted for almost a third of the national stock. Yet poverty had not been abolished, and what Joseph was about to call deprivation (which for him spanned more than poverty, encompassing emotional, intellectual, and social impoverishment) appeared, to him, to be persistent and possibly worsening.

Joseph provided a multi-causal assessment. He acknowledged that the causes of deprivation were various and intersecting. “There are economic factors,” he told the Association, “persistent unemployment and low income; living conditions play a part — bad housing and over-crowding and few opportunities for recreation. There are personal factors arising from illness or accident or genetic endowment. And there are many factors which affect patterns of child rearing.” Keith Joseph was trying to think seriously about why a generous welfare state had failed to eliminate the suffering it was designed to address. He believed that the most important of the many causes of deprivation was the one that passed down the generations within families:

Perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduce themselves from generation to generation. If I refer to this as a “cycle of deprivation” I do not want to be misunderstood... I am saying that, in a proportion of cases, occurring at all levels of society, the problems of one generation appear to reproduce themselves in the next.

With all the qualifying, and mitigating language Joseph was laying the groundwork to advance a hypothesis that he would later be more bold in articulating. But this strategic language is also, in retrospect, the thing that gave the theory its political durability. His approach in the 1972 speech was designed for sympathetic listeners to accept the underlying frame without committing to any specific policy.

Joseph made the case that the children of the deprived were, in some meaningful sense, already lost:

Do we not know only too certainly that among the children of this generation there are some doomed to an uphill struggle against the disadvantages of a deprived family background? Do we not know that many of them will not be able to overcome the disadvantages, and will become in their turn the parents of deprived families?

Joseph, then Secretary of State for Social Services was speaking to a roomful of women who ran nursery playgroups and telling them, in plain English, that some of the children they were caring for were beyond the reach of the institutions designed to help them; that the next generation of inadequate parents was already, at the age of three or four, present in the room. The job of social policy, by implication, was less to break the cycle (Joseph was unsure it could be broken) than to manage its consequences. He went further, in a passage whose implications would be made fully explicit at Edgbaston two years later. Towards the end of his speech, Joseph addressed the role of the state

If there is to be in the years ahead more emphasis on preparation for parenthood, this will depend largely on social attitudes among the population as a whole and on the local authorities and other public bodies and voluntary organisations... in the community. What the Government itself at central level can or should do is limited.

The state, in Joseph’s judgement, could not be the answer; not because it was not able to, but because the problem was one of culture and family that lay beyond the legitimate reach of the central government.

Joseph rearticulated these sentiments in his Edgbaston speech of October 1974 but in even more stark terms:

A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world ... Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness ... They are producing problem children ... The balance of our human stock, is threatened.

That speech probably cost him the leadership of the Conservative Party, because he suggested, in terms that immediately scandalised the press, that the lower social classes were having too many children and that the demographic balance of the country was being damaged as a result. The reaction was so fierce that Joseph withdrew from the leadership contest within weeks, clearing the way for Thatcher. But the speech’s underlying argument survived him, and it survived into the political programme of the government he helped design. By 1979, when Thatcher took office, the cycle of deprivation theory was no longer a mere observation. Rather, it was a settled element of Conservative thought, and would later become a key element for the basis of British social policy.

What makes the cycle of deprivation theory so important is that it gave the Thatcherites a way of believing that the damage their programme was about to cause would, in the long run, help the very people it was hurting. If the problem was not material but moral, then cutting their incomes, closing their factories, breaking their unions, and forcing them to stand on their own feet was not cruelty. It was tough love. It was what a responsible adult did for a child who had been indulged by a foolish parent.

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Thatcherism takes shape

Once this moralistic view of British society had taken root in the emergent Neoliberal hegemony of Thatcher’s Conservative Party, the policies followed naturally. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite quotes Alfred Sherman (Thatcher’s speechwriting guru and the co-founder of the CPS) on the theoretical foundation: “We simply recognise the force of self-interest in human affairs, particularly economic affairs. We neither praise it nor denigrate it.” Sherman claimed that self-interest was not the same as selfishness, because people are embedded in families and communities; when Thatcherites talked about the individual, what they meant, Sherman said explicitly, was “the family.” The family was the moral unit. The state was a corrupting influence on that core unit of community. Free markets were the mechanism by which families could be returned to their natural condition of industrious self-reliance.

The implementation, from 1975 onwards, was the work of the Centre for Policy Studies and, later, of the inner circle Thatcher assembled around her once she took power. Scott-Samuel and his colleagues, drawing on John Foster’s work, describe the plan that emerged: “In the years between 1975 and 1979, those around Thatcher — in particular, Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley — developed detailed proposals for government. Their view was that defeat of the movement that had forced Heath’s U-turn would require, not simply the disengagement of the state from industry, but the substantial destruction of Britain’s remaining industrial base.”

From the outset, a Thatcherite reading of Neoliberalism necessitated the dismantling of state infrastructure in Britain because “large-scale manufacturing and extraction industries, generally strongly unionized and often linked to the large-scale provision of social housing at subsidized rents by local government, were seen to underpin a working-class solidarity that gave this confidence a potent political expression.” Clearly, any sense of solidarity in community that was elevated above the family unit was anathema to their program for societal change.

David Harvey, in his 2005 study A Brief History of Neoliberalism, states: "Neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power." Harvey's claim, grounded in the economic data assembled by marxists economists Duménil and Lévy (in their 2004 publication Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution) is that whatever neoliberalism said about freedom and morality and the rejuvenation of national character, what it did - measurably, in every country where it was implemented - was transfer wealth and political power from the bottom of the income distribution to the top. The Thatcherite programme was no exception. In essence, both things were true at the same time, there was indeed a sense of moral conviction and that made the redistribution possible by giving it a language that didn't sound like class war - even when that is what it was.

North Sea oil was the boon to Thatcher’s government in economic terms, which would make the destruction affordable. The windfall from the oil fields, coming on stream in the late 1970s, could be used to cushion the exchequer through the years of mass unemployment that the programme would produce. John Foster says as much, in a passage in Scott-Samuel’s article:

As the pound became a petro currency, it would be allowed to rise in international value. Capital would be exported on preferential terms. Very large-scale unemployment would end the ‘cycle of rising expectations,’ permit the historic defeat of the trade union movement and then allow the repatriation of capital on its own terms.”

The Argentine journalist Rodolfo Walsh, describing similar programmes in Latin America, called them the economics of “planned misery.” Scott-Samuel’s team applies the phrase to what Thatcher’s government did to Britain, with good reason. The misery was planned, then executed.

In this context, we can revisit the quote from Ridley, with which we opened this series, and read with new perspective: There is no point in undertaking it if we are not prepared to go through with it. It is evident he was referring to a specific programme for change, with specific foreseen, societally harmful consequences. In Scott-Samuel’s words this would mean “whole towns, indeed entire regions, would see the decimation of their economic bases and would become severely deprived.”

The men who helped to build Thatcherism did not stumble into the destruction of British industry. They planned it, using Neoliberalist principles as the ideological framework with which to justify their actions. Taking in conjunction with Ketih Joseph’s view of social deprivation, it follows that you cannot re-moralise a nation without first dismantling the institutions that are teaching it the ‘wrong’ morals. The council estates, the nationalised industries, the strong unions, the generous welfare state - all of them had to go, not because they were inefficient (although the Thatcherites argued they were) but because they were producing the wrong kind of British person and the wrong kind of British society.

In May 1979, Thatcher became Prime Minister and the small group of ideologues who had formulated her ascendency grew to a group of six ministers who would meet ex-Cabinet for weekly breakfast meetings: The Thursday Breakfast Club.The six people were Thatcher herself, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, Keith Joseph, John Biffen, John Nott, and Nigel Lawson. They met every Thursday morning for breakfast at Number 10. The meetings were kept secret from the full Cabinet for over a year. As Biographer John Campbell put: “From the start, the full Cabinet never discussed economic policy at all.”

It could be said that the breakfast club essentially ran the economy. Britain was in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s, with unemployment rising towards three million, and for more than a year the existence of the meetings was not known to the public and was not even known to most of the ministers theoretically responsible for implementing the policies the meetings produced. Campbell explains the mechanics: “Economic policy was determined by the ‘E’ Committee chaired by [Thatcher] herself. She held weekly breakfast meetings with the monetarist inner circle. These Thursday breakfasts remained secret until they were revealed by Hugo Young in the Sunday Times in November 1980.” The full Cabinet learned about them, like the rest of the country, from the newspaper.

The only minister excluded from the inner circle who held any economic portfolio at all was James Prior, whom Thatcher appointed to the Department of Employment explicitly because she did not want him near the rest of the economy. Prior was a wet - one of the Heath-era Tories who thought the programme Thatcher was pursuing was dangerous, and who understood, probably better than the true believers did, what it was going to cost. He left his own account of what it was like to sit in meetings with her during this period, quoted in Campbell’s biography. “If a minister tended to be in the slightest bit longwinded,” Prior recalled, “or if she did not agree with his views, Margaret would interrupt.” Prior added: “She would furiously resist an argument by every device at her disposal one day, only to reproduce it unblushingly the next day as her own.”

Not all dissent was confined to the Cabinet corridor. Sir Ian Gilmour, the Lord Privy Seal and one of the most senior wets in Thatcher's first government, went on the record in February 1980 with a direct warning: "A free State will not survive unless its people feel loyalty to it," he told the Sunday Times, "and they will not feel loyalty to it unless they gain from the State protection and other benefits... If the State is not interested in them, why should they be interested in the State?" He also famously derided Thatcher's monetarism as "the uncontrollable in pursuit of the indefinable." Gilmour was sacked in the September 1981 reshuffle.

Bob Jessop, writing with co-authors in 1988, described the resulting style of government as “one that is orchestrated from above, by a small prime ministerial clique within (but not necessarily of) the Cabinet.“ The Thatcherite plan to restructure British society along Neoliberal lines was executed in this fashion. Indeed, it stands to reason that one could not implement such a programme for change when the moral justification - which entails the further deprivation of the most dispossessed - if the whole of Cabinet, the Government, or indeed the country at large was in on it.

Geoffrey Howe’s first budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer is one of the most consequential acts of British economic policy in the twentieth century, and it was put together in conditions that would have been considered reckless in any ordinary government. The budget was criticised for how early in the term it was produced and that there was a widespread sense that there had not been sufficient research or analysis of the markets to produce a suitable budget. However as much as a gamble that Howe’s budget was, it worked to the advantage of the breakfast club and the E Committee; excluding the Cabinet and bypassing convention.

Howe’s budget, in historian Peter Riddell’s summary, did four things:

The key measures were a reduction in the top marginal rate of tax on earned income from 83 to 60 per cent, a cut in the basic rate of income tax from 33 to 30 per cent and a higher threshold for the investment income surcharge. These concessions were financed in part by a large switch to indirect taxation through the replacement of the previous split rates of Value Added Tax (VAT, 8 and 12.5 per cent), by a single rate of 15 per cent and by rises in other indirect taxes.

In plain English, this meant a redistribution of the national tax burden from the rich to the poor. Howe’s income tax cuts disproportionately benefited higher earners, whilst hikes in VAT hit working people hardest, as well as the poorest households in the country. In one afternoon, Howe took twenty-three percentage points off the top rate of income tax and paid for it, in part, by making the weekly shop visibly more expensive for the people who could least afford it. The June 1979 budget was not austerity in the modern sense of cuts to public spending, though cuts would follow. It was instead a form of wealth transfer to the richest in society.

Alarm in response to Howe’s budget was not confined to the political class. In March 1981, an unprecedented joint letter signed by 364 leading university economists was published in The Times. Their assessment was stark: "Present policies will deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability." At the time this was likely largest collective intervention by British academic economists in the post-war period, and yet it was ignored. Howe's second budget, delivered the same month, tightened fiscal policy further.

Adding insult to injury, interest rates, which had been at 12 per cent, were raised to 14 per cent within weeks and to 17 per cent by the end of the year. Exchange controls were removed, allowing an outflow of capital from the UK that would reach, within seven years, hundreds of thousands of jobs exported abroad. What Scott-Samuel’s team calls a “veritable bloodbath“ ensued: a recession so sharp that, by the their account, “the depth of the recession had not been anticipated but those who were strongly influenced by monetarist thinking seized on it as an opportunity for forcing through radical changes.” The unemployment figures that followed - rising past two million by 1980, past three million by 1982, and staying above two and a half million until nearly the end of the decade - were not, within the terms of this neoliberalist fever dream, a failure. They were, in Foster’s phrase, the means by which the cycle of rising expectations would be ended and the trade union movement would be historically defeated. This was the moment for Ridley’s reminder not to flinch.

Unemployment (and unemployment benefit) became the central political problem of Thatcher’s first term. Three million people out of work meant three million people drawing on a welfare system that was, by post-war design, intended to catch precisely the kind of casualty the government’s economic programme was now producing in industrial volume. The Beveridge settlement had assumed that mass unemployment was an aberration to be insured against. The Thatcher government was now generating it on purpose, and in doing so it was generating a welfare bill of a scale and political visibility that nobody in the Cabinet had quite reckoned with.

To address this albatross around the neck of the first Thatcher government, they made the case that the welfare system was not just expensive but causally implicated in the unemployment it was supposed to address - that benefits were, themselves, the reason people were not working. This is not a new idea, and indeed it is a pernicious falsehood which has pot-marked British political discourse on the welfare system up to today. As early as the mid-1970s, Conservative thinkers around the Centre for Policy Studies had been developing what one of them, the journalist Ralph Howell, named the “won’t work” thesis. The thesis was straightforward: if benefits were too generous, people would prefer them to work. Peter Cropper, an officer in the Conservative Research Department and a founder member of the free-market group Longbow, explained: “the nation has willed the level of unemployment and supplementary benefits up to a level which is dangerously close to (or in some cases actually above) the remuneration available at work.”

What Cropper doesn’t say is that benefits were too low. Nor does he say that wages at the bottom of the labour market were too low. It says that the gap between the two was insufficient and that the arithmetic of the welfare state had eroded the moral incentive to work. This implies the solution is not to raise wages, but to lower benefits. Lowering benefits, in a country where three million people were unemployed is a politically damaging position which requires moral justification. The cycle-of-deprivation theory, which Joseph had been refining for nearly a decade by this point, supplied the cover. If the unemployed were not really victims of policy but products of a culture of dependency, then cutting their benefits was not cruelty. It was, in the Thatcherite vocabulary, the restoration of incentives.

As Scott-Samuel and colleagues record, the Thatcher government’s first term saw the abolition of the earnings-related supplement to unemployment benefit in 1982; reductions in the real value of state pensions; the removal of inflation-linking from a range of welfare payments; and a roughly 7 per cent reduction in state expenditure on social assistance over the decade. None of these measures was framed as an attack on the unemployed. All of them were framed as the rational tightening of a system that had, in Thatcherite analysis, become an engine of the very dependency it was supposed to alleviate. Nigel Lawson, then Financial Secretary to the Treasury and later Howe’s successor as Chancellor, was privately the most explicit about what was actually going on. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite notes that Lawson was not theoretically opposed to reducing unemployment benefit rather than cutting taxes on earnings, and that he was prepared to argue, in private, that “a reduction in unemployment pay wouldn’t actually reduce unemployment.” The cuts were not, in Lawson’s own reasoning, a mechanism for getting people back into work. The jobs were not there to go back into. The cuts were - for Lawson - a mechanism for ensuring that “the gap between unemployment benefit and average industrial earnings steadily widens.”

As we conclude this first installment into our Deep Dive on Thatcher’s legacy and how we are still reeling from decades of ill-placed Neoliberalist policy in Britain, it is important that we don’t overly villainise Joseph,Thatcher, Ridley, Howe, Lawson and other Thatcherites as a group of cold-hearted ideologues, however tempting. The fact is, they were true believers in Hayek and Friedman (although there is academic debate about which political philosopher had the most influence - a general rule of thumb would be that Hayek took root in Britain more than in the US, and the reverse can be said for Friedman). Thatcherites believed Britain had lost its way. They believed the post-war settlement had produced a generation of Britons who had forgotten how to work, how to save, how to accept responsibility for their own lives, and how to tell the difference between freedom and dependency. They believed that the institutions designed to help the poor were the institutions making them poorer. They believed, with Keith Joseph, that the cycle of deprivation could be broken, and that breaking it would require a kind of discipline that the British state had been hesitant to implement. The worst interpretation of Thatcher and her acolytes would be to suggest they were either villainous or stupid. No, they were intelligent people, ideologically driven with a conviction in the efficacy of their actions. Frankly, that is more alarming than any caricature we can sketch.

The installments in this Deep Dive series will explore the impact of the Thatcherite programme which we have attempted to shed light on here. We’ll examine Thatcher’s legacy across the miners’ strike, through the geography of the North-South divide, through those who got sick in Thatcher’s Britain, and the regions that were hollowed out by her three successive governments. We will learn more about who bore the cost of Thatcher’s politics, and why we’re still paying.

If you are reading Consequences: History for the first time, this is what we do. We examine the historical narratives that shaped the world we live in and try to understand their impact. Subscribe, and Part 2 will land in your inbox.

We would particularly like to hear from readers who remember the first years of the Thatcher government - from factories, from dole queues, from the kitchen tables of families who were being told the pain was for their own good. Leave a comment!

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Sources:

• Joseph, Keith. “The Cycle of Deprivation.” Speech to the Pre-School Playgroups Association, Church House, Westminster, London, 29 June 1972. Quoted in Local Government Review 136 (1972): 617, and The Times, 30 June 1972.

• Joseph, Keith. “Our Human Stock Is Threatened.” Speech at Edgbaston, Birmingham, 19 October 1974. Full text held at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, document 101830.

• Thatcher, Margaret. Interview by Douglas Keay. Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987, 8–10. Conducted 23 September 1987. Full transcript held at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, document 106689.

• Gilmour, Ian. Quoted in The Sunday Times, 10 February 1980. Entered into the Hansard Parliamentary Record, 14 February 1980.

• “Letter from 364 Economists.” The Times, 30 March 1981.

• Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

• Campbell, John. Margaret Thatcher: Grocer’s Daughter to Iron Lady. London: Vintage Books, 2009.

• Duménil, Gérard, and Dominique Lévy. Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Translated by Derek Jeffers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

• Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

• Jessop, Bob, Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley, and Tom Ling. Thatcherism: A Tale of Two Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

• Riddell, Peter. The Thatcher Government. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

• Hall, Stuart. “The Great Moving Right Show.” Marxism Today, January 1979, 14–20.

• Scott-Samuel, Alex, Clare Bambra, Chik Collins, David J. Hunter, Gerry McCartney, and Kat Smith. “The Impact of Thatcherism on Health and Well-Being in Britain.” International Journal of Health Services 44, no. 1 (2014): 53–71.

• Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Florence. “Neo-Liberalism and Morality in the Making of Thatcherite Social Policy.” The Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (2012): 497–520.

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Quote: Marta Zapala-kraj, ‘Mafia – the History with Mario Puzo’s Godfather in Background,’ (PhD diss., GRIN Verlag, 2010) 16

For over half a century, the global understanding of organized crime has been filtered through the sepia-toned lens of Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s writing. Yet, in dismantling the romanticism of this fiction, we uncover historical and social complexities in the make up of organised crime in the United States. By deconstructing the Godfather narrative, we uncover a story of e…

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If England could afford to call 1688 ‘bloodless,’ it was because the bloodletting was pushed outward; primarily into Ireland, but also into the Scottish periphery. Scotland under William III exposes something subtle and corrosive in his rule: the slow erosion of her sovereignty through neglect, obstruction, and administrative force. Where England celebrated constitutional settlement and Ireland endured conquest, Scotland found itself governed at a distance by a king who never visited, rarely listene…

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Y tan humano como, el hombre que quiere su pan,

estas palabras les bastan, porque no se les dará nada más.

Pues, un, dos, tres. Pues, un, dos, tres.

¡Compañeros, en tu lugar!

Porque estás afiliado a la pueblo del frente popular.

In the Europe of the 1930s, as the realities of fascist government began to take shape, music emerged as one of the most portable weapons available to those who stood on the frontline against oppression. As a contemporary of the Nazi takeover in Germany, and the Spanish Civil war; one of the voices which carried a defiant message through song was Ernst Busch. Busch was an actor, singer, militant, and ultimately an exile. He belonged to a generation for whom art was inherently political. He lived through the cataclysmic events of twentieth-century Europe, and nowhere is his prominent stance against the rise of authoritarianism clearer than in his rendition of Das Lied von der Einheitsfront - The Song of the United Front.

Busch was born in Kiel in 1900. Growing up dur…

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Quote: Arthur Young, a Suffolk farmer who published A Tour in Ireland, 1776 - 1779. Published in 1780.

In 1698 William Molyneux the Anglo-Irish Writer, philosopher and close friend of John Lo…

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Quote: Irish philosopher and friend of John Locke, William Molyneux, writing in 1698.

I. The Model Coup' d’état

In contemporary global politics, the nature of regime change is stark. In recent days the United States - under the President’s edict - has abducted the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and by Trump’s own words, has assumed control of the country for an indeterminate period of time (or some diluted form of governance as this Atlantic article explores). The method by which the US is dismantling the Venezuelan administration, and in a manner which is (in the most charitable interpretation) extremely legally dubious; is nothing new. That is to say nothing of its long historical involvement with regime change in Latin America, and its pseudo-colonial relationships with the Philippines and other Pacific nations. Indeed, models for seizing power tend to follow a similar pattern. Whatever the flimsy rationale that props up such coups (be it oil or the global war on drugs) be under no illusion that the only true motive in such instances is power. One such historical model for this can be found in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688/9. England at the time presents itself as a nation wracked by political instability, constitutional crisis, and a people purportedly stifled by religious and monarchical oppression. In fact, the Glorious Revolution was neither glorious, nor a revolution. Rather it was a methodical seizure of power which - as is playing out with US involvement in Venezuela - was not always driven by a coherent strategy and ultimately laid the foundations for varying forms of oppression; violent or otherwise.

The Glorious Revolution is a foundational myth of the British state, a narrative of sensible, bloodless progress that supposedly set England on a unique path toward parliamentary democracy. However, the parallels with modern “color revolutions” or foreign-backed interventions are striking. Conventional interpretations suggest that when William of Orange landed at Torbay, he did not come as a conqueror, but as an invited guardian of a state in turmoil. His Declaration of Reasons performed the same function as a modern press release from a provisional government: it reframed a massive military operation as a necessary constitutional correction.

As we will explore in this three-part series, the events of 1688–89 and beyond were neither glorious - given the displays of carnage on the Irish and Scottish frontiers - nor a “revolution” in any radical, transformative sense. In England, the movement was a transfer of power, managed by the elite, backed by foreign bayonets, and justified after the fact by a sophisticated propaganda machine. William III’s coup was a moment where the English political class, paralysed by their own internal divisions and fearful of popular mobilisation, for or against King James II, following the Restoration, chose to import a foreign monarch to secure a domestic oligarchy.

It would be a fair critique to say that this trilogy of articles would be challenging to produce without a comprehensive investigation of England in the mid-seventeenth century (i.e. the English Civil War, Commonwealth under Cromwell, and the Restoration). Nevertheless, we will persevere and revisit this earlier, most pivotal juncture of English (really, British) history in future Deep Dives. Stay tuned.

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II: A Constitutional Cold War: Purse, Sword, and the Stuart Dilemma

To understand why the English elite turned to a Dutch Stadtholder, we must first dismantle the reductive notion that 1688 was a spontaneous reaction to James II’s Catholicism. While religion provided the emotive fuel, the underlying friction was structural. For nearly a century, the English state had been locked in what Gary W. Cox describes as a cold war over the fundamental levers of power: the purse and the sword.

After the inheritance of the English Crown by the House of Stuart, to the coming of William’s invasion, the relationship between the Crown and Parliament was defined by a grinding, unresolved contest over financial independence and other Rights. The Stuart kings, James I, Charles I, Charles II, and finally James II, repeatedly sought to bypass the necessity of parliamentary tax grants. As Cox observes:

Throughout the short seventeenth century (1603–1688), Parliament frequently asserted its power over the purse and the Crown repeatedly sought to evade that power and establish financial independence… Most of the time, the war over the constitution was cold.

James II did not create this conflict, but he brought it to a crisis point by attempting to resolve it through the professionalisation of the state. He sought to expand the “dispensing power” (the royal prerogative to bypass statutes) and to build a standing army officered by Catholics and loyalists. To the Whig and Tory elites, this was not merely a religious threat; it was a threat to their role as the pivotal intermediaries of the state. If the King could rule through a professional bureaucracy and a standing army, the “ancient constitution” which guaranteed the local power of the landed gentry would be rendered obsolete.

Cox identifies three primary strategies used by the Crown to resist parliamentary supremacy, and the response of Parliament to counter these measures; tempering the control of the Crown over the running of the State, and bolstering its own position. He explains:

The first and least radical prong of royal strategy was to control Parliament from within, by buying seats, buying votes, and manipulating the parliamentary agenda. The second prong was to rule legally without Parliament; the Stuart kings could and did refuse to call Parliament for long periods, seeking to find sufficient revenues via various technically legal gambits. The third and most radical prong was to crush Parliament and establish a more absolutist regime by force.

Of Parliament’s response he continues:

Parliament’s strategy to assure its supremacy, or at least bolster its constitutional position, was not simply to proclaim its rights in the broadest possible terms. It had tried that before—e.g., in the Petition of Right 1628—without success. Thus, radical parliamentarians began to devise constitutional impediments that would hinder each prong of the king’s strategy. After the Revolution, new impediments were enshrined in the settlement documents sensu lato

By 1688, the perception among the political class was that James was transitioning from the second strategy to the third. Yet, the memory of the 1640s, the trial and execution of Charles I and the subsequent chaos of the Commonwealth, acted as a profound deterrent. A collective trauma in the psyche of English, Scot, and Irish of that most destructive conflict and oppressive rule under Cromwell, meant whig and Tory alike sought to avert conflict as far as possible. The English elite wanted to discipline the King, but they were terrified of the people. This paralysis created the vacuum that William of Orange was invited to fill. Equally, it was fear of ‘the people’ which brought them so forthrightly into constitutional discussions following William’s seizure of power as we will see; principally through the issuing of the Bill of Rights in 1689. Of critical importance - to be explored in parts 2 and 3 of this Deep Dive, where the devastating inequity with which the Bill of Rights was (or in truth was not) provided to the Scots and Irish.

III. The ‘Invitation’ and the Management of Consent

The traditional narrative emphasises the ‘Invitation of the Seven’: this being the letter sent to William by a handful of aristocrats in June 1688, as a mandate from the nation. In reality, it was a desperate gamble by a narrow faction. The ‘Seven’ were not representatives of a popular movement; they were conspirators who understood that a domestic uprising was both unlikely and dangerous to their own interests. Historian Robert Barnes explains:

Only seven notables signed the invitation of June 30 to William of Orange asking him to land an armed force and defend the liberties of Englishmen. Not only was Scotland unrepresented in this document, the northern kingdom was uninformed that the invitation even had been made.

William’s intervention was essentially a staged revolution, a term used by Lois Schwoerer to describe the unprecedented mobilisation of print, spectacle, and persuasion that accompanied the Dutch invasion. William understood that to rule England, he could not appear as a conqueror. He needed to be “invited.” As Schwoerer notes:

Never before in England or on the Continent had these instruments [meaning propaganda] been utilized together in such large number for a single purpose or employed, perhaps, with greater effect… If William’s purposes were to be fulfilled without significant bloodshed, he needed a major effort to influence public opinion.

William, a Stadholder of the United Provinces was born just a couple of years after the Peace of Westphalia which ended the Eight Years’ War (1566 - 1648); a conflict begun by his great grandfather William the Silent and in part led by his great uncle, Maurice. A truly martial figure, raised in a legacy of rebellion, William of Orange required substantial efforts to rehabilitate his figure for the English people. Schwoerer explains:

First of all, William had to appear kingly to the English public. Yet the prince was not at all attractive physically. Standing just over five and a half feet tall, he had spindly legs and little feet like those of a child. His thin, slight body with its slightly deformed back supported a head marred by a huge, beak-like, and crooked nose that destroyed the symmetry of his face. Black, poorly aligned teeth further detracted from his appearance

…

To be kingly, William also had to seem kind and courageous, just and wise. Thus, though the stadholder was known by his intimates to be irritable and short-tempered, tracts called him “benign,” even “ affable “ and ‘”of . . . sweet temper.” He conquered his enemies by the “charming dispositions of his Mind,” and his nature combined the “meekness of Moses” with the ‘Courage and Valiancy of Joshua

The PR work on William’s image paled into insignificance in the light of his pièce de résistance: The Declaration of Reasons. This central propaganda item; printed on a mass scale, was a masterpiece of obfuscation. It carefully avoided claiming the throne, instead framing the expedition as a defensive act to ensure a “free and legal Parliament.” In its distribution also lay its effectiveness. Just as Steve Bannon might propose a strategy of ‘flooding the zone’ to confuse his political opponents and control the political narrative; William’s camp drew first blood in the propaganda war. Schwoerer explains:

The Declaration of Reasons was everywhere in the fall of 1688. The manifesto appeared in four languages: English, Dutch, German, and French. It was printed at Amsterdam, Edinburgh, The Hague, Hamburg, London, and Magdeburg. Copies printed at The Hague bore the official imprimatur of the prince: “Printed at The Hague by Arnold Leers by special order of His Highness. “ Altogether, twenty-one editions in the four languages appeared in 1688, eight of them in English.

This rhetoric allowed the English military and the Anglican clergy to desert James II without technically violating their oaths of “passive obedience.” By framing the invasion as a “rescue,” William provided the elite with a face-saving mechanism to accept regime change. In truth, by this time James had voluntarily fled to France and one could easily argue that the Anglican Clergy or other ruling elite would not embarrass themselves by welcoming in a new ruler to the power vacuum James had left behind.

What can’t be overstated is the points of variance which pervaded throughout William’s seizure of power, his coronation, reign and further into the eighteenth century. The conflict of ideas and interpretations at this crucial time in the nation’s identity is recognised in Ulrich Niggemann’s comprehensive interrogation of ‘memory’ in recounting these formational events. He states:

The mainstream of memorial texts depicted William as England’s providential deliverer, and this was also the official version presented, for example, in the forms of prayer for the services of thanksgiving on 31 January, 14 February and 5 November … James’ flight to France was interpreted in many accounts of the revolution as a voluntary desertion, abdication or resignation, leaving the throne vacant for William. A few accounts differed from this version. [Pamphleteer] Samuel Johnson, for example, accused the authors of such stories of being liars, whose stories served to keep up the passive obedience doctrine of the anglican clergy, which condemned every form of resistance, even against tyrants. In Johnson’s version, James was driven out of the country by the people aided by William. For him the people had a right to defend themselves against tyranny and oppression

…

It is obvious, therefore, that different memories and different narratives of the revolution were in play and that the consensus reached in the Convention was fragile. However, the breakup of consensus and the beginning of a ‘memory war’ within the camp of the supporters of the revolution became obvious only towards the end of William’s reign and during the reign of Anne.

Returning to William’s efforts to win popular consent for his rule, it should be acknowledged that the efficacy of his propaganda campaign has been hotly debated. Tony Claydon argues that the ubiquity of the Declaration may actually point to its failure to achieve universal consensus:

The ubiquity of the Declaration in 1688 may have been a result of its failure as publicity for the Orange cause… Those who wished to block William’s progress found they could adopt the rhetoric of the document and deploy it against its original sponsor.

Not only this, but its crafting as a propaganda piece to be disseminated widely, forged new disagreements within William’s camp. Schwoerer:

… some counselors argued that in the manifesto the dispensing power - that is, the discretionary power to set aside laws traditionally exercised by the king - should be made the “main ground” for the expedition, because “the body of the whole nation” had been disturbed by James’s use of it, and, therefore, it “would seem very strange” if it were not the main reason for William’s invasion. Others maintained that the dispensing power was a legal power of the crown which had been exercised for ages and that James’s stretching of that legal power was not a just basis for an invasion. They charged that political calculation and not sincere abhorrence of the use of the dispensing power was the real reason for giving it first priority. The aim, they said, was to win over the bishops and high Tories who had suffered the most as a consequence of the king’s employing the dispensing power.

Despite this friction, the ‘Invitation’ served its purpose: it transformed a foreign military operation into a domestic constitutional event. It allowed the English to pretend that they were not being conquered, but rather restored.

That is not to discount the propaganda efforts of James II and his supporters; albeit they ultimately lost the communication war. Schwoerer:

As a publicist, James II was no match for William III. James’s position was seriously weakened because so little printed material promoting his side was available. James was not entirely blind to the power of public opinion; earlier in his reign he had rigorously enforced the already established laws and procedures for censoring printed matter. And, in the spring of 1688, the court inspired rumors, commissioned tracts, and dispersed gratis quantities of the king’s “papers.” As the crisis deepened in October George Jeffreys (James’ lord chancellor) ordered coffee houses, upon pain of forfeiting their licenses, to keep no written news but the official London Gazette; and James issued a proclamation forbidding the discussion of political affairs by writing, printing, or speaking.

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IV. The Legal Fiction of the Vacant Throne

The climax of the revolution (read: coup) in England was not a dramatic battle or surreptitious string of political arrests. Rather it was a debate in the Convention Parliament of early 1689. When James II fled to France - an act facilitated by William, who arguably allowed his father-in-law to escape to avoid the political mess of a trial - the English political class faced a massive legal vacuum. The resulting settlement was a triumph of what we might call ‘creative ambiguity’. The Convention declared that James had abdicated and that the throne was vacant. As Schwoerer points out, these terms were chosen precisely because they were imprecise:

“James’s acts broke the fiduciary relationship between king and people and left the throne “vacant”; they were tantamount to an “abdication.” This view aligned Locke with left-wing Whigs. Recently, scholars have aired the possible meanings of the words “abdication” and “vacancy,” forgetting perhaps that obfuscation was calculated and that it forwarded agreement.

‘Abdication’ implied a voluntary act, which James certainly did not intend; ‘vacancy’ allowed the Parliament to fill the throne without admitting they had deposed a divinely ordained monarch. This was the moment where political theory was forced to catch up with military reality. The elite were not interested in establishing a new system of government; they were interested in repairing the old one in a way that ensured their own dominance.

To further flesh out the intellectual gymnastics required to legitimise the Williamite coup, we must look closer at how John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government provided the indispensable philosophical scaffolding for the legal fictions of “abdication” and the “vacant throne.”

The genius of Locke’s justification lay in his redefinition of political authority not as an inherent right of the monarch, but as a fiduciary obligation granted by the community for the protection of property and order. By framing the relationship between James II and the English people in these terms, Locke was able to argue that the King’s actions - specifically his use of the dispensing power and his flight from London - were not merely errors of judgment, but a formal dissolution of the government itself. In this Lockean framework, James had not been deposed by an invading army; rather, he had effectively ‘dethroned’ himself. Locke’s central move was to argue that when a ruler violates the trust of the people, the government is dissolved, and power reverts to the community. Schwoerer:

Locke placed in the people the power of judging whether the Executive had violated his trust - a very radical idea... [but] Locke did not… recommend extending the suffrage, widening the Convention, or reforming the representative body.

This radical idea was used to serve a profoundly conservative end. If the government had already dissolved due to James’s breach of trust, then the Convention Parliament was not a rebellious body seizing power, but a necessary gathering of the community to prevent a slide back into the state of nature. This intellectual maneuver allowed the Whig elite to bypass the uncomfortable reality of a foreign invasion. William was not a conqueror; he was a facilitator who arrived precisely at the moment when the English state had, by the King’s own hand, ceased to exist.

In the pantheon of Western political thought, John Locke is often cast as the philosopher of 1688, the man whose Two Treatises of Government inspired the overthrow of tyranny. However, a closer look at the chronology and the content of Locke’s work reveals a different role. Locke returned to England only in February 1689, after the decisive events had concluded. His work did not inspire the settlement; it legitimised it.

Furthermore, Locke’s ‘people’ were the property-owning elite. By providing a moral and philosophical framework for the removal of James, he ensured that the event could be remembered not as a chaotic coup, but as an orderly exercise of natural law. He provided the intellectual shield for a correction of power, ensuring that the ‘revolution’ remained within the safe confines of the existing social hierarchy.

Locke’s writings provided the moral authority for the ambiguity in terms. He argued that the “appeal to heaven” - the resort to force - was only legitimate once the mechanisms of civil law had failed. By framing James’s flight as the final act of a government that had already dissolved itself, Locke enabled the English political class to accept a foreign-backed regime change while maintaining the façade of constitutional continuity.

If 1688 was not a revolution of rights, it was undoubtedly a revolution of the state. The most significant and lasting changes were found in the Bill of Rights, and in the radical restructuring of the state’s finances. This is the watershed identified by Gary Cox.

Before 1688, the Stuart monarchs were plagued by a lack of credibility in their commitments, because they could not be held legally accountable for their debts and as such they could only borrow at high interest rates. Cox explains - comparing England to Continental Monarchies and their borrowing habits:

The general point here is that any monarch floating long-term debt on a large scale had to ensure purchasers that he could respond to fiscal shocks by raising new taxes, if necessary. Continental monarchs had secured enough control over their revenue streams that they could fund debts without parliamentary approval. In England, however, the king’s ability to raise new revenues was poor. To raise new taxes, he would need either to cut a deal with Parliament, or to end run Parliament via legal but “unconstitutional” gambits, or to abandon legalities and crush Parliament militarily.

The transition of power under William resolved this problem by shifting the power of the purse decisively into Parliament’s hands. As Cox details, the constitutional engineering of 1689–1694 aimed to bolster Parliament’s position in three critical areas:

1. The Short Leash: Parliament began granting tax revenues for limited periods (often just a year), forcing the King to call Parliament annually to sustain the government.

2. The Veto Over Debt: Parliament gained the implicit ability to block the issuance of new debt, ensuring the King could not borrow his way into independence.

3. Ministerial Responsibility: The development of a workable means to control the executive through the impeachment or removal of the King’s advisors.

Cox describes in details the ramifications of these critical changes in the managing of the state purse:

During the Restoration, notwithstanding the many improvements in tax collection, tax receipts showed a shallow decline from 1665 to 1685, averaging £1.53 million. After the Revolution, tax receipts more than doubled the Restoration average by 1695 and tripled it by 1700

The results were staggering. Once the Crown became disciplined and was bound by parliamentary oversight, the English state’s ability to borrow and tax exploded. Tax revenues tripled within a decade. Ironically, the predisposition to issue short-term debt increased after the ‘Revolution’ despite its disastrous effects in the lead up to the English Civil War and through the Restoration. Where short-term debt stayed roughly consistent through the 1630s, and up to the Restoration, it ballooned five-fold by 1695 and ultimately contributed to Whig decline through the eighteenth century.”

Nevertheless, the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and the creation of the National Debt allowed England to fund the massive wars against France that would define the eighteenth century. This was the birth of the fiscal-military state. 1688 didn’t make England more democratic; it made it more powerful. It transformed the monarchy from a personal office into a department of the state, managed by a committee of the property-owning elite.

In the end the ‘Glorious Revolution’ was a masterpiece in the preservation (and indeed expansion) of power through a propaganda war, effective PR management and the desire to avoid the bloodshed of a civil war which lived long in the collective trauma of the country. Although, some interpretations frame this coup as another Civil War, which will be addressed in a later installment of this deep dive. By rebranding a foreign invasion as an ‘invitation’ and a regime change as an ‘abdication,’ the victors of 1688 created a narrative of stability and continuity. They avoided the social upheaval of the 1640s by ensuring that power never left the hands of the landed and monied classes. This narrative principally rings true for England but in Scotland and Ireland events transpired in a far more oppressive manner.

The ‘glory’ of 1688 was a luxury afforded to the English elite. By displacing the inevitable violence of dynastic change to the periphery (i.e. Ireland and Scotland), they were able to cultivate a domestic image of “bloodless” progress. But as we will see in the next part of this series, the preservation and development of the English constitution necessitated nothing less than the brutal subjugation of Ireland. The liberty secured in Westminster was built upon a foundation of sectarian exclusion and military conquest across the Irish Sea.

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Next week, we trace the Orange standard to the Boyne and Limerick. We will examine how the ‘Glorious’ settlement in England necessitated a brutal military subjugation of Ireland, revealing the darkness that lay beneath the 1689 settlement and the birth of a sectarian state.

Sources

• Claydon, Tony. “William III’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution.” The Historical Journal 39, no. 1 (1996): 87–102.

• Cox, Gary W. “Was the Glorious Revolution a Constitutional Watershed?” The Journal of Economic History 72, no. 3 (2012): 567–600.

• Niggemann, Ulrich. “‘YOU WILL SEE WHO THEY ARE THAT REVILE, AND LESSEN YOUR … GLORIOUS DELIVERANCE’: THE ‘MEMORY WAR’ ABOUT THE ‘GLORIOUS REVOLUTION.’” In Memory before Modernity, edited by Erika Kuijpers et al., 63–76. Brill, 2013.

• Schwoerer, Lois G. “Locke, Lockean Ideas, and the Glorious Revolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 51, no. 4 (1990): 531–548.

• Schwoerer, Lois G. “Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–89.” The American Historical Review 82, no. 4 (1977): 843–874.

• Barnes, Robert Paul. “Scotland and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 3, no. 3 (1971): 116–27

• O’Hara, James G. “Leibniz and the Jacobite War: Reports and Reflections on the Battle of the Boyne and Events in Ireland, 1689-91.” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. Section C: Archaeology, Celtic Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature 91C (1991): 1–20.

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In Britain today, several people held on remand for actions connected to Palestine Action are refusing food. They have not been convicted but are held on remand within a legal and political climate that increasingly treats solidarity with Palestine as a form of extremism rather than dissent. Some have been refusing food for up to a month or more and some have already been hospitalised. Their bodies have begun to fail. The government insists that it bears no responsibility for the choices prisoners make with their own bodies.

This is an old claim. It has never been true.

Hunger striking is one of the few political acts that cannot be legislated away or otherwise removed by the state - since it is innately corporeal. As one Irish hunger striker put it a century ago, the strike is “the last device of the desperate,” deployed when all other forms of political speech have been sealed off. That desperation is precisely what makes hunger striking so morally unsettling for authorities. It exposes the coercive foundations of order itself.

The current hunger strikes in British prisons are unsettling because they expose the fragility of liberal claims about bodily autonomy. Prisoners, after all, are told that they retain ownership over their bodies even as those bodies are confined, searched, surveilled, medicated, restrained, and, when politically inconvenient, morally disavowed. Hunger striking challenges by asking whether individual autonomy is respected only so long as it does not disrupt authority.

What follows is not a definitive history of hunger striking. Such a history is nigh impossible to collate, for its pervasiveness spans all of human history.

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Long before hunger striking entered the modern political lexicon, fasting functioned as a form of moral coercion. In ancient Irish society, troscad was the act of fasting against one’s accuser in judicial proceedings. It allowed the societally weak to compel the powerful without violence. George Sweeney traces this practice to the Brehon Laws, noting that fasting was “a means of arbitration,” rooted in the belief that allowing someone to die at your door carried moral and social consequences.

For those Celts who were neither warrior, nor bard nor chieftain, redress was obtained through troscad (fasting against one’s accused). Troscad provided the opportunity for the aggrieved person to make his protest close by the offender’s home, where the protest would draw attention both to the hunger striker’s grievance and to the alleged wrongdoer.

This reveals that hunger striking was not so much an act of self-destruction as it was an act of protest in the pursuit of justice. Responsibility is often as much societal as it is personal. In hunger strikes there are always two actors, if not a third. Those being: the striker who refuses food, the government or authority who refuses to act, and the wider community who can tip the scales by demanding justice.

Tracing this ancient cultural phenomenon further, and as Christian theology fused with older ritual practices in Ireland, fasting became moralised and sanctified. By the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this moral grammar had been absorbed into nationalist politics. Suffering became redemptive. Padraic Pearse articulated this most explicitly during the cultural revival preceding the Easter Rising of 1916, framing political struggle as a form of blood sacrifice. Sweeney explains:

For Pearse, the insurrection was not so much a military operation as a deliberate act of blood sacrifice; a redemptive re-enactment of Calvary. Militarily the insurrection was doomed from the start, but as a redemptive act, the ‘bloody protest’ triumphed.

Hunger striking inherited this sacrificial logic wholeheartedly. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, it became what Sweeney calls “an essential ingredient of militant republicanism.” Between 1913 and 1922, around 1,000 prisoners participated in hunger strikes. In 1923 alone, nearly 8,000 did so during the Irish Civil War, making it one of the largest hunger strikes in history.

The 1923 hunger strike began in Mountjoy Gaol and spread rapidly across prisons and internment camps. The demand was simple: release. The context, however, was much more complex. The Irish Free State, newly established after centuries of British rule, now faced thousands of former comrades who rejected its legitimacy. As James Healy records, the government prepared itself morally in advance.

The strike was against the Irish Free State and its Government led by W. T. Cosgrave. His party won 63 seats in the General Election in August 1923; the Republicans (anti-Treaty/Free State) won 44 seats, and 46 seats were held by other groups — Farmers, Labour, Independents — who accepted the Free State. In the spring of 1923 the previous Cosgrave Government had secured a Dáil resolution to allow hunger-strikers to die. The Dáil had also passed the Public Safety Act on 9 August, and that authorized internment; the vast majority of the 8,000 hunger-strikers had been interned under that Act. Of course they did not recognize the authority of any Free State laws and they felt their internment to be most unjust.

Nor was it straightforward to maintain coherence through the strike. Some prisoners joined reluctantly, fearing it would undermine escape attempts. Others felt compelled by group loyalty. Many understood that the strike was unlikely to succeed in its stated aim, yet participated anyway. As one participant, Pax O’Faolain, later reflected, it was launched “in despair,” and because a “fermentation of anger at their prolonged inaction arose in the camps and jails.” Healy continues:

Macardle refers to the hunger-strike as ‘the ultimate weapon of prisoners,’ and Van Voris calls it ‘the last device of the desperate.’ … That desperation was one of the motives in this hunger-strike seems clear to me. But this allows for a) the absence of desperation among perhaps scores of these hunger-strikers, and b) the presence among the `desperate’ of other and stronger motives, such as group loyalty among prisoners, devotion to republicanism, nationalism, antagonism (even hatred) for enemies — perhaps clerics, or the ‘betrayers of Ireland’, or the British Empire. Whatever ‘desperation’ may have meant to these hunger-strikers, I have seen no evidence that it meant ‘refusal to trust in God for the graces necessary for salvation’ as a later Catechism defined the sin of despair.

Be it the British Empire, the Irish Free State, Tsarist Russia or the United States during the height of the Guantanamo Bay debacle (all to be addressed below) - the State remained careful, and calculated. In the case of the Irish Free state, it remembered 1920, when British authorities had allowed Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, to die after seventy-two days on hunger strike. That death had electrified international opinion and transformed MacSwiney into a global symbol of Irish suffering. The Free State was determined not to repeat that mistake but also aimed to avoid concession.

Two prisoners died around the fortieth day and shortly after, the strike ended collectively. Thousands were released within weeks; others remained imprisoned for years. Historians still debate whether the strike worked, but that debate misunderstands the function of hunger striking. Its success is not measured solely in concessions, but in what it forces the state to reveal about the true nature of its authority.

MacSwiney’s own hunger strike three years earlier is often considered the archetype against which all others are measured. Jason Perlman describes the hunger strike as a political technology designed to invert power relations.

The hunger strike is a weapon which is designed to turn weakness into strength, a political and propaganda tool which has the power to cast the striking prisoners as victims and the government being struck as against the oppressor … Although the strike failed to achieve its stated aim of MacSwiney’s release, his death was a major blow to the British government, and marked a turning point in the Irish War of Independence. MacSwiney’s sacrifice changed the way the public in Ireland and around the world viewed the struggle for independence: he came to symbolize Ireland itself. MacSwiney’s “martyrdom” was thus a triumph in the struggle for Irish independence, but this triumph could only be achieved through the deaths of MacSwiney and two of his fellow-strikers, who never lived to enjoy the freedom they helped to win.

MacSwiney understood that his body would become a battleground. “It is not they who can inflict the most, but they who can suffer the most, who will conquer,” he declared. The British government understood this too. Cabinet discussions acknowledged that releasing him would undermine their authority, yet keeping him imprisoned risked a moral catastrophe. In the end they chose authority. And MacSwiney died. The British government insisted it had upheld law and order but the world saw a man starved to death in a British prison.

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Hunger striking, however, is not uniquely Irish. Its power lies in its portability. In tsarist Russia, political prisoners pioneered hunger strikes as protests against brutal prison conditions. Families pleaded for intervention but prison officials responded with chilling callousness. Writing on the hunger strikes at Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg, in the Spring of 1878, historian Kevin Grant explains:

After three days, news of the strike reached the prisoners’ families, who appealed for relief to the director of military police, General N. V. Mezentsev. The director dismissed their pleas and reportedly declared of the hunger strikers, “Let them die; I have already ordered coffins for them all.” It was a volatile period of repression and reprisal in the Russian revolutionary movement. The tsarist regime had cracked down on the revolutionary populists, the ‘narodniki’, and the era of terrorism had just begun in St. Petersburg that January, when Vera Zasulich shot and seriously wounded the city’s governor. The hunger strikers were a group of 193 revolutionaries who had been recently tried for treason and sentenced to various forms of punishment, including hard labor and imprisonment in Siberia.

Around the same time, female revolutionaries in Siberia led strikes that ended in death and suicide; their suffering publicised by exiles in the UK and elsewhere, to mobilise international sympathy. It was this “Russian method” that British suffragettes consciously adopted in the early twentieth century. Grant explains:

[Leo] Deutsch published Sixteen Years in Siberia, a memoir of incarceration in Russian and Siberian prisons between 1884 and 1901 … The authors refer to several hunger strikes, by women and men both, the earliest being the aforementioned strike in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Both highlight the hunger strikes of female politicals in Siberia, which is remarkable given the relatively small number of female politicals sent to Siberia. Politicals made up only about 2 percent of the approximately 170,000 people exiled to Siberia between 1878 and 1885.

In 1909, Marion Wallace Dunlop went on hunger strike in Holloway Prison to demand recognition as a political prisoner. Released after just ninety-one hours, she became a symbol of militant suffrage. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) celebrated her action as both a profound constitutional protest and a moral indictment on British society and government. Grant describes:

Votes for Women declared that the treatment which suffragettes received in Holloway was inferior in some respects to that which Russian political prisoners were receiving … The hunger strike was explicitly framed as a ‘Russian method,’ adapted to expose the illiberal practices of a liberal state.”

The British government responded with force-feeding, a practice that transformed hunger striking into a spectacle of bodily violation. Women were restrained whilst tubes forced into their mouths and nostrils. While officials claimed they were saving lives, the public recoiled in horror. Again, the state insisted it was not responsible for the strike, only for preventing death; and again, the hunger striker’s body became the nexus of scrutiny over authority, medicine, and morality.

By the late twentieth century, hunger striking had become a global language of protest. In 1989, as martial law descended on Beijing, Chinese students and intellectuals turned to fasting as a final appeal. Their declaration rejected both martyrdom and passivity. It stated: “We are not in search of death; we are looking for real life. Through our hunger strike we want to tell the media in China and abroad that those who protest are citizens with a sense of political responsibility, not merely objects of sympathy.”

Between the Chinese Communist Party and the student hunger strikers stood the Chinese people. It is to them that the declaration called upon for action - knowing full well the government would not yield. It stated:

We call on the Chinese people from now on to diverge gradually from and eliminate the concept of enemy and the psychology of hatred. We must completely get rid of the political culture of class struggle. We must do this because hatred can produce only violence and dictatorship. We must adopt the spirit of tolerance. We must begin to build up Chinese democracy with a democratic spirit of tolerance and concept of cooperation

The insistence that hunger striking is not a desire for death but a demand for political agency, and one that calls on public action to affect change, is recurring as we examine hunger striking through history. Yet nowhere has it been as ritually encoded as in Northern Ireland.

The hunger strikes of 1980–81 at the Maze Prison were ostensibly over prison conditions and the political status of the prisoners. But, they were also reenactments of a sacred political drama that had played out in Ireland for centuries. Prisoners who had spent years on the blanket protest described themselves as “entombed,” living in cells like graves. For Bobby Sands, only a renewed act of sacrifice could redeem both his fellow prisoners and their cause for a united Ireland. George Sweeney explains:

Support for prisoners on ‘the blanket’ was declining during the early part of 1981, and to many their protest appeared futile given the circumstances that surrounded the ending of the 1980 hunger strike. For Bobby Sands, only a cleansing and sanctifying act, a repeat of the blood sacrifice of 1916, could redeem the republicans and their cause.

The hunger strike that began in March 1981 “became a re-enactment of the redeeming blood sacrifice of 1916.” Ten men died and The British government held firm. Margaret Thatcher insisted that “crime is crime is crime.” Yet the strike transformed Irish politics, and internationalised the conflict, opening up myriad interpretations and polemics which retread the means and motives of these prisoners. Rebecca Graff-McRae articulates this further:

Despite its appearance of ‘timeless’ ritual, commemoration is not static: it evolves, changes, shifts, and simultaneously manifests in varied, multiple, and contradictory versions of the past. In Astrid Erll’s definition, ‘What is culturally remembered about an ancient myth, a revolution, a hero … usually refers not so much to [. . .] the “original” or the “actual” events, but instead to a palimpsestic structure of existent media representations’.

The case of the 1981 Hunger Strikes exemplifies these myriad and contradictory intersections of memory and media: encoded as mythic, revolutionary, heroic - and also, criminal, terrorist, and pragmatic - via a complex ‘knot’ of political, historical, cultural, and fictional referents, the strikes represent and reproduce a profoundly political tangle of commemoration, contestation, and contradiction.

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This is why hunger strikes never remain in the past but are continually revisited as a longstanding, culturally permeative method of creating change. Hunger strikes resurface whenever authority overreaches and calls it order.

Where Hunger Strikes are understood in our collective consciousness through the famous and infamous (the Suffragettes, MacSwiney, the Maze prisoners) there are innumerable instances which garner less attention; or which are not framed in as stark terms.

For instance - consider the hunger strikers of Trinidad in the 1970s. Press clippings of the day described:

In another instance, perhaps better known within the United States, than abroad. Newspapers in 1982 called to our attention seven women who went on hunger strike in response to the Equal Rights Amendment (1972) which had failed to get sufficient state ratifications by the deadline. Indeed, Virginia became just the 38th state to ratify the amendment in 2020. Off Our Backs (from quoted in the story of Trinidad strikers above) published in 1982:

As recently as 2015, hunger strikes have been effective in securing the necessary rights for those incarcerated by the United States (extrajudicially) in Guantanamo Bay. Kandida Purnells’ analysis of the 2013-2015 hunger strike is as comprehensive as it is damning. Purnell describes the hunger strikers as “nobodies” - not as a pejorative, but accurately, in a legal sense, because of their denied humanity at Join Task Force Guantanamo Camp Delta (JTF-GTMO):

Having been denied full application of the writ of Habeus Corpus [sic] (which for Agamben produces the individual body as the primary target of sovereign power and means in Latin that you have the body), the bodies processed by JTF-GTMO upon their arrival at Camp Delta ceased to be … Abandoned and denied even their own bodies, the video testimony made public in 2008, of one of Camp Delta’s juvenile detainees Omar Khadr, speaks directly to this loss of the body, illustrating its repercussions on the embodied individual. “I have lost my eyes, my feet, everything”; a weeping Khadr tells his interrogators before whom he also lifts up his orange jumpsuit top to reveal scars on his chest as he explains how requests for medical attention have been ignored by MPs.

In response to this dehumanisation, detainees embarked on a hunger strike in 2013 to protest indefinite detention. Purnell describes the context to this strike in detail stating:

For JTF-GTMO, hunger striking detainees are not a new phenomenon. In his memoir, [Mozzam] Begg recalls how upon his arrival at the detention facility, then known as Camp X-ray, fellow detainee Airat Vahidov went immediately on hunger strike as a means to protest against his treatment but that “really nothing changed.” Similarly, the Miami Herald’s May 2013 online inmate profiles provide details on the hunger strikes of twenty-four detainees including Ariq ba Awdah, 34, a Yemeni man whose lawyer says he’s been on an uninterrupted hunger strike since February 2007. “I haven’t tasted food for over six years,” he wrote his lawyer, Omar Farah, in April. “The feeding tube has been introduced into my nose and snaked into my stomach thousands and thousands of times.”

Consistent with the dehumanisation of these ‘nobodies’, it becomes apparent that JTF-GTMO’s standard operating procedure included torture methods “aimed to ensure that Camp Delta detainee’s bodies should be left unmarked by physical violence.” Techniques included “stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, clothing removal, exposure to extreme temperatures, forced shaving, and the induction of stress through aversion (such as fear of dogs).”

Despite the horrors experienced by detainees at Camp Delta, and the continued suffering of those who embarked on hunger strike over the two-year period: their turmoil was met with denial, obfuscation, and ultimately success. Purnell surmises:

With regard to the 2013-2015 hunger strike, it is certainly the case that detainees aimed to use the corporeal vulnerability of their bodies in pain for the purposes of shattering the language and order of US power, blocking them from view and barring them from the political …

As the hunger strike persisted in the weeks leading up to Obama’s NDU speech, there had been some indication that dialog over the 2009 executive decision to place a moratorium prohibiting the transfer of Camp Delta detainees to Yemen was being reconsidered when Yemen’s Human Rights Minister Hooriya Mashhour flew to Washington, DC, in early May 2013 with the stated purpose of regaining custody of the Yemeni citizens remaining there. As predicted, in the speech President Obama declared: “I am lifting the moratorium on detainee transfers to Yemen.” … True to Reprive Founder/Director Clive Stafford Smith’s word that “my clients say they will start to eat if—and only if—cleared men start to go home,” the hunger strike died down toward the end of 2013.

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In each of the cases we have explored through this lengthy exploration of hunger striking as an effective means of political protest, we have seen that it has been met first with entrenchment by authorities, then by outrage from public domains, and finally with concessions.

Which brings us back to Britain’s hunger strikers, today.

The Palestine Action hunger strikers are not invoking some ancient cultural mythology or nationalist fervour. They are refusing food because they believe that the legal system holding them has ceased to deliver on the humanitarian justice from which it claims its authority.

Hunger strikes should not be necessary. Yet hunger striking persists because it exposes something fundamental. It reveals that authority ultimately rests on the willingness to let bodies fail. Governments can insist that prisoners choose to starve. History remembers more clearly their choice not to intervene.

More importantly than the question of why hunger strikers refuse food is: can the State live with the consequences?

That question now sits unanswered in Britain’s prisons.

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At time of writing:

• Qesser Zuhrah is held on remand at HMP Bronzefield and was taken to hospital after more than 45 days on hunger strike and described as critically ill.

• Amu Gib is held on remand at HMP Bronzefield and has been on hunger strike for 47 days.

• Heba Muraisi is held on remand at New Hall prison and is reportedly on day 46 of their hunger strike.

• Jon Cink is held on remand and ended his hunger strike after 41 days.

• Teuta “T” Hoxha is held on remand at HMP Peterborough and is on day 40 of her hunger strike.

• Kamran Ahmed is held on remand at HMP Pentonville. He has been hospitalised and is reported to be in a life-threatening condition.

• Muhammad Umer Khalid is held on remand at HMP Wormwood Scrubs and reportedly ended his hunger strike after 13 days.

• Lewie Chiaramello is held on remand at HMP Bristol and is on a partial/intermittent hunger strike.

All are being investigated for involvement in proscribed organisation, Palestine Action and are variously being investigated for suspected involvement in protest action taken at RAF Brize Norton, Elbit Systems, and the Filton protest.

Sources:

• Bell, J. Bowyer. The Secret Army: The IRA, 1916–1979. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979.

• Cardozo, Thomas. Irish Republicanism and the State. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979.

• Deutsch, Leo. Sixteen Years in Siberia. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903.

• Fox, R. M. The History of the Irish Republican Army. Dublin: Anvil Books, 1938.

• Gaughan, J. Anthony. Thomas Ashe and the Irish Volunteers. Dublin: Anvil Books, 1977.

• Grant, Kevin. “British Suffragettes and the Russian Method of Hunger Strike.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 1 (2011): 113–143.

• Graff-McRae, Rebecca. “Fiction, Encryption, and Contradiction: Remediation and Remembrance of the 1981 Hunger Strikes.” Nordic Irish Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 19–39.

• Healy, James. “The Civil War Hunger-Strike: October 1923.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 71, no. 283 (1982): 213–226.

• Kennan, George. Siberia and the Exile System. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1891.

• Lin, Chong-Pin, Liu Xiaobo, Zhou Duo, Hou Dejian, and Gao Xin. “Tiananmen Square Hunger Strike Declaration.” World Affairs 152, no. 3 (1989): 148–150.

• Macardle, Dorothy, ed. The Irish Republic. Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1951.

• MacEoin, Uinseann. Survivors. Dublin: Argenta, 1980.

• MacManus, M. J. The Story of the Irish Race. New York: Devin-Adair, 1944.

• Martin, Augustine. The Literary Image of the Irish Nation. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1968.

• O’Donnell, Peadar. The Gates Flew Open. London: Jonathan Cape, 1932; reprint, London: Panther, 1966.

• O’Faolain, Pax. Life Story. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1934.

• O’Faolain, Pax. The Irish. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.

• O’Broin, Leon. Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978.

• Off Our Backs. “Hunger Strike.” Off Our Backs 5, no. 11 (1976): 5.

• Off Our Backs. “Hunger Strike.” Off Our Backs 12, no. 7 (1982): 12.

• Perlman, Jason. “Terence MacSwiney: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hunger Strike.” New York History 88, no. 3 (2007): 307–319.

• Phillips, Paul. “Hunger Strikes and the Dáil.” Dublin, 1923. Cited in Healy, “The Civil War Hunger-Strike.”

• Ratcliffe, Barrington. Irish Political Prisoners. London: Gollancz, 1935.

• Sweeney, George. “Self-Immolative Martyrdom: Explaining the Irish Hungerstrike Tradition.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 93, no. 371 (2004): 337–348.

• Van Voris, Jacqueline. Constance de Markievicz: In the Cause of Ireland. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1967.

• Van Voris, Jacqueline. “Women in the Irish Civil War.” Journal of Women’s History 8, no. 2 (1976): 321–345.

• Younger, George. Ireland’s Civil War. London: Collins, 1968.

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History often imagines medieval England as a world dictated by rigid social and religious boundaries: Christian and Jew, noble and serf, Church and outsider. But the reality of life for England’s Jews before the late thirteenth century was as entangled with English social and political life, as it was precarious. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Jewish communities lived in London, Lincoln, York, Oxford, Norwich, and smaller towns across the kingdom. They lived mostly in peace among Christian neighbours. Jewish physicians treated Christian nobles; Jewish administrators worked in royal courts. The lines between communities were apparent, but daily life was characterised - for the most part - by routine coexistence.

This delicate balance rested on an idea articulated as early as the sixth century by Pope Gregory the Great. In a letter that would shape medieval Church policy for centuries, Gregory urged Christian rulers not to engage in wanton violence against Jews:

Just as it should not be permitted the Jews to presume to do in their synagogues anything other than what is permitted them by law, so… they ought to suffer no injury in those things which have been conceded to them.

Gregory espoused a doctrine of conditional protection: Jews were tolerated because, in Christian theology, their presence served a purpose: as witnesses to Scripture, living proof of Christianity’s triumph, and, perhaps, future converts at the end of days. [That last point is extremely pertinent in light of the rise of Christian Nationalism today and its deluded notion of a pending rapture wherein Judaism plays a key role].

It cannot be overstated that for the Jews of England throughout the Middle Ages; their existence was pointedly unequal, characterised by wide reaching discrimination and restrictions on their participation in society. Christian England (and Europe, for that matter) operated a framework of subordination. But within that framework, Jewish life could, and did, flourish - relatively speaking.

The twelfth century saw Jewish scholars like Jacob ben Meir Tam articulate the economic realities of the diaspora. Responding to Christian criticisms of usury, he wrote:

We live among the nations and it is impossible for us to earn a living unless we deal with them… It is therefore no more forbidden to lend at interest than it is to engage in any other business.

This was a truth few Christian polemicists acknowledged: Jewish moneylending arose not from avarice, but from necessity. Christian society, and even the Church, depended on the practice far more than it ever wished to admit.

Historian Solomon Grayzel (notably writing in 1933) said of the Church’s tolerance and official stance of protection over the Jews of Christian Europe in the thirteenth century:

These favourable expressions are a welcome relief from the constant flood of accusations and of orders for the degradation of the Jews. They contrast so sharply with the usual attitude, that one can hardly blame the Jewish historian for giving voice to his suspicions that some, at any rate, of these favourable expressions, were bought and paid for.

The best histories of this period in Jewish history are, not surprisingly, produced by leading Jewish academics. It is pertinent that Grayzel would look back on their persecution across Medieval Europe at a time when European Jews were on the precipice of their most existential threat in more than two thousand years of persecution. Other impressive accounts of this era are presented by Robert Chazan - who passed away in 2024, Joseph Shatzmiller - who wrote extensively on Medieval Jews in the medical profession, and Rebecca Rist - who has directly connected Medieval Jews to the institution of Crusading.

Image: The Jew’s House - Lincoln, England. Built c.1170. Thought to have been home to a prominent Jewish family, this house was repossessed by the Crown in the wake of the Expulsion in 1290. It is one of the best preserved domestic homes in England.

The economics of dependence:

To understand the place of Jews in thirteenth century Europe, we must understand usury: the single most inflammatory point of contact between Christians and Jews. Christian doctrine prohibited the taking of interest with uncompromising severity. Canon law placed usury alongside sins such as “homicide, sacrilege, perjury, incest and homosexuality” - revealing the moral weight the Church attached to lending for profit Yet the entire economic infrastructure of medieval Europe ran on credit. Without it, lords could not finance wars, abbeys could not manage estates, merchants could not travel, and the Crown itself could not function.

With medieval Jews marginalised from most trades, burdened by heavy taxes, and constrained to occupations Christians avoided, Jewish communities turned to moneylending. They lent to nobles, townsmen, churches, and kings. One of the most extraordinary examples is Aaron of Lincoln, whose loan network stretched from Yorkshire to London. When he died in 1186, the Crown inherited vast outstanding debts; a trove so large that the Exchequer created a dedicated branch, the Exchequer of the Jews, to manage the income. This system made Jews indispensable. But it also meant they were exposed and vulnerable to the Church and the Crown. Robin Mundill attributes zealous pursuit by the Church to rid the Christian world of Jewish usury to a loss of revenue from such practices:

The prevention of land alienation by the Provisions of 1269 also put a stop to the Church making gains from Jewish usury. Now the Church no longer gained materially from Jewish business activities, it was ready to make a more enthusiastic attack on the Jews and to demand conversion.

In England, the royal court protected Jewish communities not out of benevolence but profit. Medieval contemporary Henry de Bracton captured this in a phrase as cold as it was accurate: “They do not live for themselves… The Jew was Crown property.” Edward I’s Provisions of 1269 were a direct response to both increased Church taxation and his reliance on Jewish loans to fund his own crusade (1271 - 72). Edward’s actions follow a persistent reliance on these lines of credit. A translation of Pipe Roll 16 [A Medieval financial record] from the reign of Henry II , in relation to the funding of an expedition to conquer parts of Ireland in 1170 reads: “Josce [Joseph] Jew of Gloucester owes 100 shillings for an amerciament for the moneys which he lent to those who against the King’s prohibition went to Ireland.” The translator of this Pipe Roll, Joseph Jacob explains:

This is clearly a reference to Strongbow’s expedition in August 1170 which resulted in the conquest of Waterford and Dublin, and roused Henry’s fears that Richard of Striguil would create an independent kingdom in Ireland. The expedition would have been impossible without financial help, for Richard had no independent means, and William of Newburgh… states that his chief motive in going to Ireland was to escape his creditors.

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From tolerance to suspicion:

If economics built a fragile bridge between Christians and Jews, theology dug the moat beneath it. The thirteenth century marked a turning point in the Church’s stance toward Jewish communities. Their tone hardened and rhetoric sharpened. Stories about Jews, their supposed danger, and their alleged spiritual pollution, began to shift from episodic outrage to systematic ideology.

Innocent III, perhaps the most influential pope of the Middle Ages, offered a glimpse of this shift. In 1205, writing to the King of France, he warned that Jewish usurers had grown so powerful that: “By means of their vicious usury… they appropriate ecclesiastical goods and Christian possessions.” This was more than a complaint about debt. It was an accusation that Jews posed a structural threat to the spiritual and material order of Christendom.

The pivotal moment came with the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, one of the Church’s grand legislative assemblies. Canon 67 declared:

The more the Christian religion refrains from the exaction of usury, the more does the Jewish perfidy become used to this practice… in a short time the Jews exhaust the financial strength of the Christians.

It ordered Church leaders to deny all contact between Christians and any Jew who charged “heavy and immoderate usury.” Nevertheless, the Canon revealed an ironic truth: the Church understood that its own condemnation of Christian usury had given Jews a monopoly and with it, a degree of political influence. It had created the very financial dynamic it now sought to dismantle. Elsewhere, the council demanded distinctive dress for Jews, further embedding the idea that they were a people apart and laying down frameworks of discrimination which would fuel antisemitism for centuries..

Meanwhile, anti-Jewish rhetoric began to echo the language of heresy, the internal enemy the Church had resolved to crush through new instruments of religious war. By the century’s end, some Christian thinkers would assert that Judaism itself was a heresy; a move that placed Jews symbolically alongside Cathars, Waldensians, and other targets of crusading zeal.

This theological reimagining of the place of Jews in Medieval Christian society set the stage for profound political change.

Image: Illustration from the Codex Manesse, compiled between 1300 - 1340. It depicts The figure on the far right is wearing a pointed hat (Judenhut), a type of hat that Jews were forced to wear in medieval Europe as a distinguishing marker - highlighting the perpetual nature of antisemitism and minority persecution during the Medieval era.

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Crusades: a means for religious oppression

We tend to envision the Crusades as wars waged across the Levant between Christians and Muslims in attempts to secure key religious sites for one side or the other. In truth, this was the impetus for Crusading as a movement to begin with. But by the thirteenth century crusading as an institution had morphed into a means by which Europe’s Chritian nobility could continue their wars and expansionist policies under the guise of piety and with the cleansing of the soul which provided remission of sins. By the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, Crusades had already been fought against heretics in France (the Albigensian Crusade was decidedly Christian-on-Christian warfare, as explored in-depth in our Deep Dive), as well as in the Fourth Crusade, which was a milestone in the object of crusading in its attempt to re-join the Eastern Orthodox Church with the Catholic West. Even, perhaps, earlier, in the twelfth century, the Reconquista proved to be not only an exercise in expelling the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula but also a clear opportunity for the Kings of Aragon, Castile, Leon and Navarre to expand their own interests, both political and financial

Historian Elizabeth Hallam notes that under Innocent III, crusading experienced “important developments… which changed the whole organisation and scope of the movement.” No longer was the crusade only about reclaiming or defending the Holy Land. It became a tool, one the papacy could deploy against anyone seen as a threat to Christian unity.

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229) provides a stark example. In a 1204 letter preparing the ground for this campaign against heretics in southern France, Innocent III granted crusaders the same indulgences as those fighting Muslims:

Those who faithfully shall have laboured against the heretics would enjoy the same indulgence… as those crossing the sea for the aid of the Holy Land.

This equivalence was a watershed moment in how rulers in Medieval Europe wielded their power. Fighting fellow Europeans, even fellow Christians, could now earn the same spiritual rewards as fighting on the edges of Christendom.

The Fourth Crusade (1202–1204; ostensibly called to liberate Jerusalem, nevertheless veered into the Adriatic and sacked the Christian city of Zara, then infamously besieged Constantinople. As Innocent III reflected:

How, indeed, is the Greek church to be brought back into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See when she has been beset with so many afflictions and persecutions that she sees in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs

Crusading, once a holy war against external enemies, had become an elastic instrument. It could be turned against heretics, political rivals, rebellious cities, or entire populations. This ideological expansion had profound consequences. If crusade meant purifying Christian society - rooting out threats to the faith - then Jews, who had long been portrayed as spiritually dangerous, suddenly fit into the new framework of Christian holy war.

No crusade was ever formally called against Jews, since they lacked the cohesion and authority to be a credible threat to Christian power; but crusading logic permeated the world that increasingly saw them as enemies.

Despite mounting hostility, papal correspondence occasionally reveals moments of protection; small hints at the older, Gregorian vision of Christian responsibility. In a letter condemning violent debt-collection practices in France, Gregory IX wrote of Christian lords who mistreated Jews: “They tear their finger-nails, pull out their teeth, and inflict upon them other kinds of inhuman torments.” He ordered the clergy to ensure Christian debtors honoured their obligations.

Robert Chazan, analysing this letter, remarked that while the papacy objected to Jewish usury, it also recognised when “legitimate anti-usury efforts… had been exploited for illegitimate cancellation of honest debts.” But these interventions were isolated moments. The tide was turning toward restriction, segregation, and suspicion.

The dominant narrative was not one of benevolent protection, but a policy of containment.

Image: Clifford’s Tower in York, England. First built in 1068 following the Norman invasion, then rebuilt in 1069 following Viking raids. Clifford’s Tower is the site of a noted massacre of Jews in 1190. Here 150 local Jewish residents died, many by their own hand to avoid capture by a local mob.

The English Crown: reliance and resentment

Throughout the early thirteenth century, English kings relied heavily on Jewish financial networks. But by mid-century, that relationship began to sour. Henry III introduced laws restricting Jewish travel, employment, and residence. His statutes in the 1230s and 1240s narrowed Jewish freedoms that had existed under earlier charters. High tallages drained Jewish wealth whilst political instability and local hostility created an atmosphere of constant vulnerability.

Yet at the same time, Jews in various professions remained valued. As historian Joseph Shatzmiller notes: “We can chronicle dozens of Jewish doctors who found their way into the service of kings and princes and were employed by barons, counts, and prelates. As a result, in many instances they became intimate with the sources of power in society.” One such instance of an influential Jewish doctor is given in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jacob ben Abba Mari ben Samson Anatoli was a physician and scholar of the thirteenth century who, in 1231, was employed by Emperor Frederick II as well as being noted for his contributions to the disseminations of philosophical works

Earlier examples of notable Jewish physicians such as the previously noted Jacob ben Meir, born circa 1140 and physician of high repute in his native Barcelona, demonstrate that the Jews of Christian Europe had a reputation as successful doctors with patients ranging from the general Christian and Jewish populace, to notable rulers of the Christian world. The position of Jews in Christian society was diverse and often influential. To the secular community and its leaders, the Jews often proved a useful if not indispensable asset.

Nevertheless, this influence and access which Jews of notable professions had, would nurture a millennia long antisemitic anxiety for the diaspora across Europe. This is a pattern familiar throughout history: societies resent most the minorities on which they rely most deeply.

Image: Map showing the various Jewish Expulsions across Europe (1100 - 1600). This demonstrates the pervasiveness of Expulsion as both an act of discrimination and political policy across the Christian world. Source: http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/gallery/expuls.htm

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1290 and the Expulsion

By the 1270s and 1280s, tensions that had long simmered became acute. Edward I’s Statute of the Jewry (1275) prohibited Jews from lending money at interest altogether. It forced Jewish communities into trade and agriculture; occupations they were legally, socially, and economically ill-equipped to adopt. As one contemporary wrote, Jews were now “base-of-stock,” denied the means to sustain themselves.

Meanwhile, anti-Jewish stereotypes hardened in sermons, miracle tales, and local folklore. Ritual murder accusations as false, as they were potent, circulated widely. Clerical writers increasingly portrayed Jews as spiritual traitors within Christian lands, akin to heretics who corrupted the faithful. Across France and Brittany, earlier expulsions had set the precedent. The Edict of Brittany (1239) declared: “All debts due the said Jews… we completely remit and nullify… and no one shall be accused or summoned for the death of a Jew who has been killed.”

Such language reveals the moral erosion already underway. The idea that Jews could be expelled, or killed, with impunity periodically became a politically expedient narrative during Medieval Europe, and Edward’s England was no different. In England, there simply became more reasons not to protect Jewish communities, than to ensure their status in a Christian kingdom. Chief among these was the state of Jewish finance which, by the mid-century, was no longer profitable for the Crown. Royal debts had grown too large; tallages had drained Jewish capital and Christian hostility made the system politically costly. Robin Mundill neatly sums up the converging circumstances which led to the Expulsion:

[the Expulsion] could be seen as a concession to papal pressure; as the result of the efforts of Queen Eleanor; as a measure of summary punishment against the blasphemy of the Jews taken to give satisfaction to the English clergy; as an answer to the complaints made by the magnates of the continued prevalence of usury; as an act of conformity to public opinion; as a reform suggested by the king’s independent general inquiry into the administration of the kingdom during his absence; and as Edward’s discovery, through the complaints of the Council, of the continued deceits of the Jews

It is no coincidence that Edward’s 1275 Edict neatly followed his participation in the Ninth Crusade. What better way to repay your loans for a military expedition than to seize assets and capital from a vulnerable minority? The fact remains that, when Jews ceased to be economically useful, their legal status as “Crown property” became a justification not for protection but removal.

Historian Michael Prestwich adds to this interpretation by arguing:

In England in 1290 Edward justified his decision to [expel the Jews] by reference to their evasion of the Statute of the Jewry of 1275. However, the financial motive for the expulsion was quite clear. Not only did the Crown acquire Jewish assets, but also the grants of taxation in 1290 were made in gratitude for the royal action.

Edward, laden with debt, had taken the opportunity to mitigate his financial troubles. On two counts he was able to raise much needed funds; thus fulfilling three key motivations: the need to satisfy the complaints from Christian debtors, the politically beneficial move to ensure the support of the Church, and, perhaps most crucially, the need to put the royal coffers in the black.

To add insult to injury, Mundill puts the case that the sale of Jewish assets did not present the lucrative returns that some imagine. Investigating Hugh of Kendal’s accounts of the value of property previously owned by Jews, he states: “a mere £1,835 or so [was raised] from the sale of Jewish property.” Whilst this is a representative figure from just 16 Jewish communities, it goes some way to demonstrating that revenues raised by the Crown as a direct result of the Expulsion barely replaced that which it received in rates for Jewish money lending - which are estimated to have exceeded £100,000 (in contemporary value).

Image: A contemporary illustration showing the expulsion of the Jews. Image shows the white double tabula that Jews in England were mandated to wear by law.

On 18 July 1290, Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion. Around 2,000 Jews were forced to leave England, the first national expulsion in England but not the first in Europe, and certainly a template for later ones. No crusade banner was raised. No armies marched against England’s Jews, but the ideological architecture was unmistakable. The expulsion portrayed Jews as enemies of Christian order and promised spiritual purification through their removal. It united the Crown, Church, and populace against a constructed internal threat and served financial and political interests simultaneously.

This was, in everything but name, the logic of crusade turned to the benefit of internal politics. A kingdom that had once been shared, albeit imperfectly, and with discrimination that was typical of the time, was nevertheless dismantled in a single generation. For 360 years, Jews remained expelled from England; until Cromwell’s Commonwealth of the 1650s.

The expulsion of the Jews in 1290 is not a distant vestige of medieval history. It is a mirror into the patterns of power and persecution. It is a warning.

When a society convinces itself that purity requires exclusion, systemic violence becomes a feature, not a bug.

How do you see the Expulsion of 1290 relate to contemporary events? Leave a comment below.

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Sources:

• Fourth Lateran Council. Constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). In Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta. Bologna: Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 1973.

• Gregory the Great. Epistolae. In Patrologia Latina, Vol. 77. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1849–1855.

• Innocent III. Epistolae et Privilegia. In Patrologia Latina, Vols. 214–216. Edited by J.-P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855.

• Jacob ben Meir Tam. Sefer ha-Yashar (Responsa of Rabbeinu Tam). Edited by Shlomo Schlesinger. Vienna: 1811.

• Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay. Historia Albigensis. Translated by W.A. and M.D. Sibly. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998.

• Chazan, Robert. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 1000–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

• Grayzel, Solomon. The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century. Philadelphia: The Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1933; revised ed. New York: Hermon Press, 1966.

• Hallam, Elizabeth. Capetian France, 987–1328. London: Longman, 1980.

• Mundill, Robin R. England’s Jewish Solution: Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

• Prestwich, Michael. War, Politics and Finance under Edward I. London: Routledge, 1972.

• Rist, Rebecca. The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

• Shatzmiller, Joseph. Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Image: The Bayeux Tapestry (c.1070). Bishop Odo rallies the Norman army during the Battle of Hastings, 1066. Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, France.

When William of Apulia described the Normans as “a people greedy for profit and power,” he simultaneously condemned them and highlighted their driving ambitions. Between the years 1000 and 1300, a dynasty of Viking settlers, baptized into Latin Christendom, remade the geography of Europe. From the cathedrals of Rouen and Durham to the palace of Palermo or Carrickfergus castle in Ireland, they created a network of power that historians still struggle to quantify. Was it an empire? A series of disjointed conquests? Or was it something more elusive: a civilisation bound by the persistent ambition of its rulers?

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Image: Communion of Louis IX of France. Illumination from the manuscript of the chronicler Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, Life and miracles of Saint Louis, 14th century, National Library of France, French 5716, fol. 61 verso.

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Louis was born in 1214 into a dynasty that had already begun to imagine itself as the moral centre of Christendom. His grandfather, Philip II Augustus, had expanded the French monarchy into a power capable of rivaling the Empire; his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled as regent with an iron will and a deep sense of piety, however performative. The young Louis absorbed these influences. He inherited a kingdom that was becoming stronger, more centralised, and ambitious. He approached his charge with solemnity and a deep sense that his kingship was bestowed upon him by God. To Louis, kingship was not a legal arrangement but a divine vocation. As the historian Jacques Le Goff observed, “The king’s body was the body of the realm, and the salvation of the realm depended on the salvation of that body.” Justice, peace, and crusade were the three pillars of his rule; together they formed a theology of governance. His legislation at home, his personal austerity, and his drive to extend royal justice were core influences on his vow to take the cross. For Louis, ruling France and rescuing the Holy Land were parts of the same divine narrative.

When Jerusalem fell to the Khwarazmians in 1244, the crusading ideal still lingered in Western Christian imagination, though its moral clarity had long since dimmed. What had once been a collective penance had become, by the mid-thirteenth century, an instrument of royal (and political) policy. To take the cross was to assert leadership over the Christian world. Louis’s decision to go to Egypt was thus both strategic and symbolic. Egypt was the economic heart of the Ayyubid world, a route to the Levant and, in the minds of Western commanders, the key to reclaiming Jerusalem. Remembering that, but this time numerous attempts had been made to recapture Jerusalem for Christendom via a direct, maritime route or over land through Anatolia. Only the First Crusade had been successful; and even in that case it presented abundant failures. Louis’ advisers urged caution, and encouraged prudence from their king. But Louis, having recently survived a near-fatal illness, read his recovery as an act of God and embarked on crusade in gratitude. To delay was to defy Providence.

Image: Depiction of the Battle of La Forbie in a manuscript of the Chronica Majora, by Matthew Pari held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. On the right, Knight Templars, with a black and white flag. The Battle of La Forbie (1244) was a decisive defeat for the combined Crusader and Ayyubid forces against the Khwarazmians and Egyptians, effectively ending Christian military power in the Holy Land before Louis IX’s crusade. It shattered the fragile Latin–Muslim alliances that had maintained the Crusader states and directly inspired Louis to take up the cross.

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The army that landed at Damietta in 1249 was among the most formidable ever to leave Europe. For a brief moment, fortune smiled on the crusaders. The port city fell with surprising ease, and the crusaders pressed on into the Nile Delta. Yet within months, their triumph dissolved. Disease spread through the ranks, supplies dwindled, and the summer floods turned the landscape into a trap. At al-Mansurah, the French vanguard charged too soon and was annihilated. Louis himself was captured at Fariskur the following spring. According to chronicler Jean de Joinville, “the king was taken prisoner like any other man, and we wept bitterly, for we had lost our earthly hope.” The crusade that had begun with great fervour, had ended prematurely in ransom and humiliation.

Louis’ course of action upon capture is what forged his legend. His was an image cultivated by chroniclers like Joinville, who in recording Louis’ capture wrote: “He said to me: ‘Seneschal, I thank our Lord that I have been captured, for it has pleased Him to humble me; and I have found more sweetness in this misfortune than I have ever found in good fortune.’” In another account, chronicler Guillaume de Nangis wrote: “The king showed a patience so steadfast that it seemed no adversity could break him, nor any success corrupt him.” Louis refused to abandon his sense of moral purpose. Remaining in the Levant for four years after his release, he rebuilt fortifications, negotiated truces, and tended to the sick and poor. He prayed barefoot through the streets of Acre, washed the feet of lepers, and wrote letters of repentance to his mother. The failure of arms became, in his mind, a victory of the soul. William Chester Jordan, in Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade, argues that “the crusade was the crucible in which the moral conception of Louis’s kingship was purified.” Having failed as a general, he sought to succeed as a saint.

Image: Saint Louis taken prisoner in Mansoura, during the 7th crusade in 1250, by Gustave Doré. Nineteenth Century.

Louis’ transformation after the Seventh (and subsequently Eighth Crusade - also a failure) would shape his reign at home. Returning to France in 1254, Louis embarked on a series of reforms that re-imagined the institution of monarchy as principally a moral authority. He forbade private wars between nobles, restructured the Parlement of Paris, and issued the Établissements de Saint Louis: a compendium of royal law aimed at justice and restraint. He ordered the burning of usurious ledgers, tightened the regulation of coinage, and banned trial by combat. These were actions of a ruler bent on reforging his legitimacy.

And yet the myth of Louis’ piety did not grow in a vacuum. It was cultivated, even curated, by those around him. The chronicler Guillaume de Nangis would later describe Louis as “a mirror of all Christian kings.” The Cistercian order, the mendicant friars, and papal envoys all seized on his image as a model of Christian rule. Within two decades of his death, he was canonised. This propagandised image of Louis IX spread quickly through France and the Catholic world. His relics were paraded through Paris for all to marvel and pray over. Louis’ sainthood was performative. It was the curation of a story; a political narrative. As historian M. Cecilia Gaposchkin has shown, the liturgical texts celebrating Saint Louis were as much about shaping monarchy as sanctity. They presented him as the ideal king who ruled through piety and humility, a figure who made royal power seem divinely necessary.

What is often lost in that narrative is the complexity of Louis’s own moral project. His was not a gentle piety. He presided over the persecution of Jews, ordering their expulsion and the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242. He endorsed the Inquisition’s expansion in France and oversaw the enforcement of heresy laws, especially across the Languedoc (as described in detail in our Albigensian Crusade Deep Dive). Louis’ ideal of the Christian state left little room for difference. In ‘The Apple of His Eye’, Jordan traces Louis’s obsession with conversion: “No Catholic ruler was more dedicated to the undertaking of bringing the unbeliever to the faith.” The saint-king’s charity was inseparable from his conviction that the world must be remade in the image of his God.

If the Seventh crusade failed militarily, it succeeded theologically. It offered Louis a stage on which to perform kingship as penance. Joinville’s memoir (our most intimate window into the king’s character) preserves this interna; contradiction: that of a sovereign who wept over the poor and ordered the torture of heretics. That of the warrior who saw surrender as obedience to God’s will. “I saw the king, sitting on the sand,” Joinville wrote, “more joyful in his captivity than others are in liberty.” It is an extraordinary image; one that gives insight into the mind of a King who was as calculating as he was sincerely pious.

Modern historians have sought to reconcile this tension of ideas surrounding Louis IX. Jacques Le Goff read Louis as “a saint for the state,” a ruler whose spirituality made government sacred. Caroline Smith has instead emphasised the cultural pressures of crusading ideology - the way Louis’s education and courtly milieu framed the crusade as both duty and destiny. Meanwhile, Christopher Tyerman, writing in God’s War, offered a more ironic view: “Louis’s tragedy was that he pursued holiness through policy. He made sanctity a function of command.” Each interpretation circles the same problem: Louis’s holiness was inseparable from his power, yet his power depended on the spectacle of his humility. This internal conflict was reckoned with, even by Louis’ near-contemporaries. Chronicler Matthew Paris wrote of the saintly king: “He is most devout, a lover of peace and justice, a persecutor of iniquity, a protector of the Church; yet some think his piety unkingly.” Evidently, even in medieval Europe, where faith was embedded in all aspects of cultural life, many could see Louis’ actions for the performative piety they were.

Today, Louis’s crusade resonates in ways its participants could never have imagined. It stands as a template for how rulers fuse faith with politics, how those who espouse piety often belie worldly ambition. The rhetoric of mission, redemption, and civilisation that accompanied French expansion in the Levant centuries later drew explicitly on his example. As a recent symposium at SOAS observed, “Louis IX’s Crusade was reimagined from the eighteenth century to the present in order to frame France’s role in the Eastern Mediterranean.” His crusade became a cultural myth on which centuries of French colonialism was built, wherein moral purity became the language and rationale of the oppressor.

Arabic historians, long marginalised in the Western telling, offer a different lens. Mohamad El-Merheb’s recent work re-examines the Seventh Crusade through Mamluk sources, revealing how Egyptian chroniclers viewed Louis’s invasion not as holy war but as opportunistic interference amid the Ayyubid civil wars.El-Merheb writes; “To the Mamluks, Louis’s campaign was not a holy war but the last gasp of an exhausted West. Its outcome was not victory, but equilibrium restored.” From their perspective, the crusade’s outcome was not divine punishment but political inevitability: the consolidation of Egypt under new leadership. Indeed, the history of the Crusades (especially the First, Third, and those of Louis IX) are so often also the stories of power struggles within the Muslim world, which momentarily abated to face an external threat. Considering El-Merheb’s interpretation, the encounter between Louis and his captors reads less as a clash of civilisations than as a meeting of two worlds each convinced of its moral supremacy.

The enduring power of Louis’s story lies in this tension between intention and consequence. He set out to redeem the Holy Land and instead transformed the moral landscape of France. His failure abroad reshaped his understanding of justice at home. His sainthood was not the inevitable reward of virtue, but the cultural product of a society which popularised holy kings. Even his defeats were rewritten as miracles. History, as ever, preferred the simplicity of sainthood to the complexities of ambition and power.

When Louis died in 1270 whilst on campaign in the Eighth Crusade, in Tunis, his last words (according to legend) were a confession of his ultimate failure: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” He never reached the city, but he built another kind of Jerusalem in the imagination of his people. Louis IX exemplifies the enduring paradox of power and piety, the foolhardy assumption that a king can save both his soul and the world through war. His life reminds us that religious morality in politics is as misguided as it is well-intended. It can inspire compassion, but it can also sanctify violence.

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Sources:

• Joinville, Jean de. Vie de Saint Louis. Edited and translated by Jacques Monfrin. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1995.

• Matthew Paris. Chronica Majora. Edited by Henry Richards Luard. 7 vols. London: Rolls Series, 1872–83.

• Guillaume de Nangis. Chronicon. In Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, edited by Martin Bouquet et al., Vol. 20. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1840.

• Ordonnances des Rois de France de la troisième race, edited by Eusèbe de Laurière and Charles Du Fresne du Cange. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1723–1849.

• Baldwin, John W. The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

• Carpenter, David. The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284. London: Penguin, 2003.

• El-Merheb, Mohamad. “Rethinking the Seventh Crusade: The Mamluk Perspective.” Journal of Medieval Worlds 6, no. 1–2 (2024): 57–82.

• Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

• Jordan, William Chester. Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

• ———. The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

• Le Goff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

• Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A History. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

• Smith, Caroline. Crusading in the Age of Saint Louis. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

• Tyerman, Christopher. God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

• ———, “Saint Louis and the Shadow of the Cross.” History Today 66, no. 10 (2016): 34–41.

In 1960s historiography today, the expression ‘Summer of Love’ is used in three senses. It refers generally to the explosion of psychedelic sounds, images and lifestyles in that decade. It is also code for the overall phenomenon of Haight-Ashbury between 1965 and 1968. Specifically, and more accurately, it applies to the summer of 1967 in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. While the multiple meanings all carry weight, too often that first general sense of the Summer of Love shields a dialectic of hope and despair behind a banner of optimism and dreams. To put it more bluntly, the hippie experiments of the 1960s were full of Utopian promise, while the Summer of Love actually spelled the end of that particular vision in Haight-Ashbury.

Ashbolt, Anthony. “‘Go Ask Alice’: Remembering The Summer of Love forty years on.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 26, no. 2 (2007)

The summer of 1967 is perhaps the apex of countercultural idealism. It was the point where the movement’s…

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Also in 1966, Mary Quant at the age of thirty-two, published her autobiography, in which she rendered the period one of a radical break, set in train twenty years earlier by World War II: “Once only the Rich, the Establishment set the fashion. Now it is the inexpensive little dress seen on the girls in the High Street. These girls... are alive... looking, listening, ready to try anything new.... They may be dukes’ daughters, doctors’ daughters, dockers’ daughters. They don’t worry about accents or class. They represent the whole new spirit that is present day Britain—a classless spirit that has grown up out of the Second World War.... They are the mods.

Conekin, Becky E. “Eugene Vernier and ‘Vogue’ Models in Early ‘Swinging London’: Creating the Fashionable Look of the 1960s.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1-2 (2012)

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If the Sixties’ political activism sought change in the streets and in policy, the cultural revolution tried to remake all aspects of daily life. Music, art, fashion, drugs, and sexual freedom redefined what it meant to be young, free, and modern. These energies amplified protest but also exceeded it, becoming what Jonathon Green calls an “expressive revolution.” He writes: “That society, synonymously self-described as the ‘underground’ or the ‘counter-culture,’ was not … clandestine or revolutionary. It was more … an ‘expressive revolution’ … dedicated to ‘doing its own thing’.” The stress on expression, pleasure, and self-invention was real, and yet it unfolded within an economy whose affluence was unevenly shared.

The material nature of this affluence matters. As Becky Conekin, drawing on Jeffrey Weeks, reminds us, this shift sat on striking demographic and wage changes:

by 1960, there were ‘a million more unmarried people’ between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four than there had been only ten years before. That is a 20 percent increase in the number of young, unmarried people in Britain. And ‘they wielded a new economic power.’ … in terms of real wages, there was an increase of 25 per cent between 1938 and 1958 overall. More importantly, young peoples’ real wages rose by twice that. ‘And though they disposed of only some 5 per cent of total consumer spending,’ notes Weeks, ‘they were the biggest purchasers of certain commodities - 42 per cent of record players, 29 per cent of cosmetics and toiletries, 28 per cent of cinema admission, and so on.’ He characterizes this as ‘a vast new consumer market, with an abundance of relatively free income.’

The point is not that everyone shared equally in the boom, frankly they didn’t, but a critical mass of young consumers could fund (and be targeted by) a new culture of sound, style, and spectacle.

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This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Abraham Lincoln. Inaugural address: Monday, 4th March 1861.

JFK. Inaugural address: Friday, 20th January 1961.

Divided by a century, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were united by a core sentiment rooted in the American ideal. Their aspirational rhetoric highlights a harder truth: that vital freedoms remained out of reach for many.

The 1960s became a decade when ordinary people challenged inequalities within a fragile Cold War order (as we saw in Part 2). Across the world, citizens demanded civil rights, peace, and liberation. This third installment traces the major currents of political activism: the evolution from nonviolence to Black Power; the rise of women’s liberation; the ignition of early LGBT rights; and how the Vietnam War radicalised students. Aptly, we begin with the movement that set the template for the rest.

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